Contributor Biographies

ANDREA CARLSON Andrea Carlson (born 1979) is a Chicago, Illinois based painter. Her career took root in Minneapolis, Minnesota where she earned a BA from the University of Minnesota in 2003 in Art and American Indian Studies and an MFA in Visual Studies from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2005.

Her work has exhibited widely while gaining support through several fellowships including the Minnesota State Arts Board (2006, 2014) and McKnight/MCAD Foundation Fellowship (2007–08). Her work also belongs to prominent collections, including those of the Weisman Art Museum, the British Museum, and the National Gallery of Canada.

PALLAS ERDRICH says: "I've spent most of my life learning how to do stuff. After attending Hampshire College for half a minute, I went to London for film school and then skipped on to Los Angeles where I jumped straight headfirst into the moving pictures industry." For more see her website at http://pallaserdrich.com/about/

JOHN GAMBER, an assistant professor at Columbia University, received his Ph.D. From U.C. Santa Barbara. His research interests include ecocriticism, American Indian, Asian American, African American, and Chicana/o and Latina/o literatures. His book Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), examines the role of waste and contamination in late-twentieth century U.S. ethnic and indigenous literatures. He has co-edited Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, and published articles about the works of Gerald Vizenor, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, and Craig Womack, among others in several edited collections and journals including PMLA, and MELUS.

DIANE GLANCY is professor emerita at Macalester College.  Her 2014-15 books are Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education, creative nonfiction, University of Nebraska Press, Report to the Department of the Interior, poetry, University of New Mexico Press, and three novels, One of Us, Uprising of Goats, and Ironic Witness, Wipf & Stock.

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES is the author of 16 novels and 6 collections so far. Most recent is Mongrels (William Morrow).  Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado. Find him @SGJ72.

EMILY JOHNSON is an American dancer, writer, and choreographer of Yup'ik descent. She is based in Minneapolis, where she is artistic director of her performance company, Emily Johnson/Catalyst. See more about Emily's work on her website http://www.catalystdance.com/

TERESE MARIE MAILHOT is from Seabird Island Band. Her work has been featured in Carve, The Offing, and Yellow Medicine Review. She studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts and writes for Indian Country Today. 

DEBORAH ROOT is a cultural critic and writer whose arts writing has focused on the relationship between visual art and cultural politics. Her catalog work includes substantive essays on Sarindar Dhaliwal, Jorge Lozano, Ximena Cuevas and Annie Pootoogook, and her arts writing has appeared in Art Papers, Prefix Photo, Public, C magazine, the Contact Photography and Bienal de Sao Paulo catalogs, other Canadian and international journals, and most recently in ARC magazine of contemporary Caribbean visual art. She is the author of Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference, and has taught visual art and cultural politics at Ontario College of Art and Design, University of Guelph, and Bilkent University in Turkey.

ALLAN J. RYAN is an associate professor of Canadian Studies and Art History, and holds the New Sun Chair in Aboriginal Art and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Since 2002 he has hosted an annual interdisciplinary conference on Indigenous arts at Carleton. Among his publications is The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art (1999), recipient of an American Book Award for its contribution to multicultural literature. He was also co-curator, with Zena Pearlstone, of the exhibition About Face: Self- Portraits by Native American, First Nations and Inuit Artists, at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2005-2006. More recently he has lectured on Indigenous art and cinema in China and Brazil, and is currently writing an online book on Ojibway artist Carl Beam for the Art Canada Institute. Other interests include the foregrounding of Indigenous pedagogical principles in the classroom and rollerblading alongside Ottawa's Rideau Canal. In former lives he worked as a graphic designer, television satirist, singer-songwriter and recording artist. In 2015 he received the inaugural Alumni of Influence Award for Distinguished Educator from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, his first alma mater, and in 2016 he was honored with the Distinguished Alumni Award for Career Achievement from Brandon University, his second alma mater.

MIRIAM C. BROWN SPIERS is a Lecturer in the Writing Program at the University of California Merced. Her work has appeared in Studies in American Indian Literatures and Studies in Comics, and her current project examines the intersections of Indigenous knowledge and science fiction theory in Native science fiction.

TAMMY WAHPECONIAH is an enrolled member of the Sac & Fox Nation of Missouri and an associate professor of English teaching courses in American, American Indian and Ethnic American literatures at Appalachian State University.  She earned her B.A. from the University of Miami and her M.A. from Michigan State University.  She received her Ph.D. in American Literature from Michigan State University.  Her research interests include early American Indian writers and contemporary American Indian literature.  She has published a book entitled This Once Savage Heart of Mine: Rhetorical Strategies of Survival in Early Native American Writing focusing on the writings of Joseph Johnson and Hendrick Aupaumut, as well as articles on Sherman Alexie and William S. Penn.

An enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota Oyate (Rosebud Sioux Tribe), and Associate Professor at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, DAVID HESKA WANBLI WEIDEN specializes in tribal law and courts, comparative justice systems, the United States Supreme Court, and American Indian literature. He teaches courses in Native American Studies, American politics, and law and courts. A native of Denver, Weiden received his undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder, his law degree from the University of Denver College of Law, and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a licensed attorney and is the co-author of Sorcerers' Apprentices: 100 Years of Law Clerks at the United States Supreme Court (NYU Press, 2007). He has also published articles and presented papers on the Supreme Court of Canada, High Court of Australia, and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Supreme Court. He is currently conducting research on the first empirical, comparative study of American Indian court systems in the field of political science.

Weiden also studies creative writing and Native literature at the Institute of American Indian Arts under the supervision of the novelist Sherman Alexie. His ongoing research project in this area is entitled, "Red Noir: Examining the Possibilities for Indigenous Crime Literature."

RHIANA YAZZIE is a Navajo playwright, producer, director, artistic director, and actor based in Minnesota. She is a 2016/2017 Playwrights' Center McKnight Fellow, a two-time Playwrights' Center Jerome Fellow (2010/11 and 2006/07) and was a Playwrights' Center Core Member for three years. She was a playwright in residence at the William Inge Center in Independence, Kansas, Fall 2014 and is currently working on a play commission for the Inge Center. Other recent projects include a joint commission from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater to write a play for American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle and a new book of short stories.