Contributor Biographies

JORDAN ABEL is a Nisga'a writer from BC. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD at Simon Fraser University where his research concentrates on the intersection between Digital Humanities and Indigenous Literary Studies. Abel's creative work has recently been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope),The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation (Arbiter Ring), and The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21^st Century (Hayword). Abel is the author of Injun,Un/inhabited, and The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award).

CRISOSTO APACHE is a Mescalero / Chiricahua Apache and Diné (Navajo), Salt Clan born for Towering House Clan, from New Mexico, USA. He is an alumnus from IAIA (AFA 1992 / MFA 2015) and Metropolitan State University of Denver (BA, 2013) for English Writing and Creative Writing. He teaches at several colleges in the Denver Metro in Colorado. He currently lives Lakewood, Colorado with his spouse of 17 years. His public work includes Native LGBTQI / 'two spirit' advocacy, board membership, and online poetry editorials.

Some of Crisosto's work is published in Black Renaissance Noiré, Yellow Medicine Review (2013/2015), Denver Quarterly (Pushcart Prize Nominee 2014), Toe Good Poetry, Hawaii Review, Cream City Review Plume Anthology, Common Place, Tending the Fire, by Christopher Felver, and American Indian Culture & Research Journal (ACRJ). Crisosto also appeared on MTV's Free Your Mind (1993) ad campaign for poetry.

Crisosto has book reviews for the Native American Anthology Visit Tee-Pee Town (Coffee House Press 1999), published in the Poetry Project publication, Issue 175, June 1999.

BRIAN BURKHART is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University Northridge. He grew up on the Navajo nation in Arizona and is also from the Cherokee tribe of Oklahoma, where he still has a lot of family. He wrote his doctoral dissertation at Indiana University on environmental ethics and indigenous philosophy, and is in the process of having a book published by SUNY Press entitled Respect for Kinship: Toward an Indigenous Environmental Ethics.

DAVID J. CARLSON is Professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino.  He is the author of Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law (University of Illinois Press, 2006) and Imagining Sovereignty: The Discourse of Self-Determination in American Indian Law and Literature (forthcoming, University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).   

DAVID GROULX was raised in Northern Ontario. He is proud of his Aboriginal roots – Ojibwe Indian and French Canadian. After receiving his BA from Lakehead University, where he won the Munro Poetry Prize, David studied creative writing at the En'owkin Centre in Penticton, B.C., where he won the Simon J Lucas Jr. Memorial Award for poetry. He has also studied at The University of Victoria Creative Writing Program.

David has had nine poetry books published—Night in the Exude (Tyro Publications: Sault Ste Marie, 1997); The Long Dance (Kegedonce Press, Neyaashiinigmiing, 2000); Under God's Pale Bones (Kegedonce Press, Neyaashiinigmiing, 2010); A Difficult Beauty (Wolsak & Wynn: Hamilton, ON 2011); Rising With A Distant Dawn (BookLand Press: Toronto, ON 2011); Imagine Mercy (BookLand Press: Toronto, ON 2013); These Threads Become A Thinner Light (Theytus Books, Penticton, BC 2014); and In The Silhouette Of Your Silences (N.O.N Publishing, Vancouver, BC 2014). Wabigoon River Poems is David's ninth title. (Kegedonce Press, Neyaashiinigmiing, 2015).

David won the 3rd annual Poetry NOW Battle of the Bards in 2011, and was a featured reader at the IFOA in Toronto & Barrie (2011), as well as Ottawa Writer's Festival (2012). David has appeared on The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and was the Writer-In-Residence for Open Book Toronto for November 2012.

David's poetry has been translated into Spanish & German. Rising With A Distant Dawn was translated into French; under the title, Le lever à l'aube lointaine, 2013.

Red River Review nominated David's poems for Pushcart Prizes in 2012, and David's poetry has appeared in over a 160 publications in 16 countries. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.

DEBORAH L. MADSEN is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Geneva. Her research focuses on issues of settler-nationalism, indigeneity, and migration, exemplified by her work on American Exceptionalism and the white supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny. She has written extensively on the work of Gerald Vizenor, including the monograph Understanding Gerald Vizenor (2009) and the edited books Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts (co-edited with A. Robert Lee, 2010), The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor (2012), and the Routledge Companion to Native American Literature (2015).

OLENA McLAUGHLIN is a PhD candidate in English with focus in Native American literature at Oklahoma State University. She also holds an MA in Native American Studies from Montana State University. Her primary research interests focus on manifestations and functions of memory in contemporary Native American literature, art, and film. 

CARTER MELAND teaches American Indian Literature and Film courses for  the Department of American Indian Studies. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies with a thesis that  examined the role of tricksters in the works of contemporary Native  novelists. His academic work has appeared in journals like American  Studies, Studies in the Humanities, and Studies in American Indian Literatures. His fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals including Yellow Medicine Review, Lake, and Fiction Weekly. He also blogs at http://the-long-one.blogspot.com/. His debut novel, Stories for a Lost Child was published in 2017 by Michigan State UP.

MARGARET NOODIN is the author of Weweni (Wayne State University Press, 2015), a collection of bilingual poems in Anishinaabemowin and English, and Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature (Michigan State University Press, 2014). She currently works as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she also serves as director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education.

KAREN M. POREMSKI is an associate professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University, in the homelands of the Lenni Lenape people. She teaches classes in Early and 19th-century American literature as well as women's literature, Native literature, composition, and business writing. Her current research project examines the ways contemporary Indigenous writers portray the complex relationships between Native people, museums, and the objects in museums. She also enjoys writing creative nonfiction and poetry.

BILLY J. STRATTON (PhD, American Indian Studies—University of Arizona) is currently an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Denver. His teaching and research centers on contemporary American/Native American literature, critical theory and creative writing. His first book, Buried in Shades of Night, was published in 2013.

THEODORE C. VAN ALST, Jr. is Associate Professor and Chair of Native American Studies at the University of Montana. He is a former Assistant Dean and Director of the Native American Cultural Center at Yale University, and has been an Assistant Professor and Co-Chair of the Program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. His most recent work includes "Lapin Noir: To Del Rio It Went" in A Critical Companion to the Fiction of Stephen Graham Jones, ed. Billy J. Stratton from the University of New Mexico Press as well as the chapters "Navajo Joe," and "The Savage Innocents," in Seeing Red—Hollywood's Pixeled Skins: American Indians and Film (2013), available from Michigan State University Press. His current book-length project is Spaghetti and Sauerkraut with a Side of Frybread, and his edited volume The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones was released in April 2015 by the University of New Mexico Press, who are also publishing a collection of his short stories in 2018. His fiction and photography have been published in Entropy, The Rumpus, Indian Country Today, The RavenChronicles, and Yellow Medicine Review, among others. He has worked as a consultant on multiple projects for the Disney Channel as well as on NPR's All Things Considered, and has recently appeared in multiple segments of the History Channel series Mankind the Story of All of Us. He has been interviewed by The Washington Post, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Native America Calling, Smithsonian Magazine, and Al-Jazeera America Television on a variety of subjects, from Native representation and Tonto to Spaghetti Westerns, headdresses, and Twilight.

CATHY COVELL WAEGNER taught in the English Department of the University of Siegen in Germany until her retirement in July 2013. She obtained degrees from the College of William & Mary (BA) and the University of Virginia (MA, PhD). In addition to her work on William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, she has published on Native American themes, transculturality in the ethnic bildungsroman, minstrelsy, AfroAsian "postmodernist passing," 400 years after Jamestown, "hybrid tropes" in film, new diasporas, palimpsestic trajectories on the "ethnic shore," and the interaction between American and European cultural phenomena. Waegner edited a volume in the American Indian Studies Series (Michigan State University Press) in 2015 called Mediating Indianness, co-edited a project volume with Norfolk State University scholars, Transculturality and Perceptions of the Immigrant Other: "From-Heres" and "Come-Heres" in Virginia and North Rhine-Westphalia (2011), as well as, with colleagues from Université d'Orléans, Literature on the Move: Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas (2002). She served as MESEA (Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas) treasurer for four years. Her current research focuses on contemporary Native American literature, specifically in connection with issues of globalization.

CAROL EDELMAN WARRIOR joined the Cornell community as a Postdoctoral Mellon Fellow in the Department of English, and is currently an Assistant Professor. She is enrolled with the Ninilchik Village Tribe (Dena'ina Athabascan / Alutiiq), and is also of A'aninin (Gros Ventre) descent. Before coming to Cornell, Warrior taught in the Departments of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. Among her research and teaching interests are Indigenous critical theory, Indigenous philosophies, futurisms, ecocriticism, activism, literature, film, music, material culture, and sovereignty.