Contributor Biographies

STEPHEN RICHARD ANDREWS is an Associate Professor at Grinnell College, where he teaches mostly 18th and 19th century American Literature.  His primary research interests are literary pragmatism, the poetics of landscape, and the cultural history of baseball.  He has published work on W.E.B. Du Bois, William James, and synaesthesia; on Melville's "Benito Cereno" and issues of copyright; on adoption and the captivity narrative; and on the early culture of baseball.

TREVINO BRINGS PLENTY is a poet and musician who lives, works, and writes in Portland, OR. He is singer/songwriter/guitarist for the musical ensemble Ballads of Larry Drake. He has read/performed his work at poetry festivals as far away as Amman, Jordan and close to his home base at Portland's Wordstock Festival.

In college, Trevino worked with Primus St. John and Henry Carlile for this poetry work, studied with Tomas Svoboda for music composition, and Jerry Hahn for Jazz guitar. 

Trevino is an American and Native American; a Lakota Indian born on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, South Dakota, USA. Some of his work explores the American Indian identity in American culture and how it has through genealogical history affected indigenous peoples in the 21st century. He writes of urban Indian life; it's his subject.

Other titles by Trevino include: Wakpá Wanáǧi, Ghost River (2015); Real Indian Junk Jewelry (2012); Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets (2008).

JENNY L. DAVIS is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she is the director of the Native American and Indigenous Languages (NAIL) Lab and an affiliate faculty of American Indian Studies and Gender & Women's Studies. She earned her PhD in Linguistics at University of Colorado, Boulder in 2013. She was the 2010-2011 Henry Roe Cloud Fellow in American Indian Studies at Yale University, and a 2013-2014 Lyman T. Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on contemporary Indigenous language(s) and identity, with dual focuses on Indigenous language revitalization and Indigenous gender and sexuality. 

ANNMARIA DE MARS has a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, with a specialization in Applied Statistics and Psychometrics and over 30 years of experience in evaluation research. She is president of 7 Generation Games and an adjunct professor in the Department of Applied Engineering at National University.

GARY F. DORR was the Media Coordinator for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe's Shield the People project.Gary served over 11 years in the United States Army as a military police sergeant.  He has several combat deployments in the Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia area, and a total of four years in the Republic of South Korea.  After his service he attended Haskell Indian Nations University where he graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in 2004. After graduating from Haskell, he worked for several years in the field of Tribal Land Management for the Coeur d'Alene and Nez Perce Tribes in Idaho.  This is where he firmly established himself as and remains an active advocate for tribal landowners' rights.

He maintains a personal relationship to the land as a landowner, hunter, traditional salmon-gaffer, and gatherer under the stipulations reserved to the Nez Perce People in their 1855 treaty with the United States.  Gary also served as an elected member of the Nez Perce Tribe Fish and Wildlife Commission.  Gary served as a buffalo hunt coordinator and treaty language representative to the Nez Perce Tribe Executive Committee.

MARÍA REGINA FIRMINO-CASTILLO is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher who works at the crossroads. Born in Guatemala, her research trajectory crisscrosses national borders and fields of inquiry, among these: critical dance/performance studies, decoloniality, ecocriticism, and new materialism. Firmino-Castillo's current book project, tentatively titled Choreographies of Catastrophe: Corporeal Ontogenesis in the Post-Anthropocene, discusses choreographic responses to the catastrophes of modernity/coloniality, including ecological devastation, enslavement, femicide, genocide, and violence against people living non-normative genders and sexualities. The performances discussed in the book were chosen not for their aesthetic genre or place of origin, but because they demonstrate corporeal modes of ontogenesis, that is, the rehearsing and bringing into being of more livable worlds in the midst of current catastrophes. At the same time, the book examines performances that envision and begin to embody vital futures even in the post-Anthropocene, the immanent era in which humans, no longer dominant, are compelled to enact radical kin-making across life forms. Firmino-Castillo is also co-editing, with Jacqueline Shea Murphy (UCR) and Karyn Recollet (University of Toronto), an anthology on global critical Indigenous dance studies.

CHAD S. HAMILL came to Northern Arizona University in 2007 and received his PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Colorado in 2008. His scholarship is focused on song traditions of the Interior Northwest, including those carried by his Spokane ancestors. In addition to his book, Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau, he has produced numerous articles centered on Columbia Plateau songs and ceremony, exploring topics ranging from sovereignty to Indigenous ecological knowledge. Prior to his current position as Vice President for Native American Initiatives, Hamill served as Chair of the Department of Applied Indigenous Studies at NAU and as Chair of the Indigenous Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Currently, he sits on the Advisory Council of the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. He also serves as Vice President and Treasurer of the Spokane Language House, a 501c3 that contributes to the sustainability of the Spokane language.

ERICH LONGIE is the cultural consultant for 7 Generation Games. He was born and raised on the Spirit Lake Nation of which he is a member. He is the President of Spirit Lake Consulting and of Cankdeska Cikana Community College.

MOLLY McGLENNEN was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is of Anishinaabe and European descent. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of English and Native American Studies at Vassar College. She earned a PhD in Native American Studies from University of California, Davis and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. Her creative writing and scholarship have been published widely. She is the author of a collection of poetry Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits, published by Salt's award-winning "Earthworks Series" of Indigenous writers, and a critical monograph Creative Alliances: The Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women's Poetry from University of Oklahoma Press, which earned the Beatrice Medicine Award for outstanding scholarship in American Indian Literature.

MELISSA MICHAL SLOCUM is of Seneca descent. She teaches and writes about creative writing and literature. Her criticism focuses on education and representation of Indigenous histories and literatures in curricula and how her community's Good Mind acts as a theoretical way of incorporating not simply Indigenous issues in the classroom, but also understanding of such issues. Her creative work explores historical trauma within her own community. She seeks to show the many ranges of Nativeness and agency. The result from colonization isn't simply a community greatly affected by trauma, it is also a resilience which comes from an interconnectedness and spirituality which derive from the Good Mind. Those traits create a strong community which retains a sense of self-worth. She received her MFA from Chatham University, her MA from the Pennsylvania State University, and PhD from Arizona State University. She has been grateful to read at the National American Indian Museum in DC and the Amerind Museum in Dragoon. She also received an NEH summer fellowship. Melissa has work appearing in The Florida Review, Yellow Medicine Review, and the University of Iowa's International Writing Program's Narrative Witnessing project. Her short story collection, Living On the Borderlines, is due out with Feminist Press February 2019, and she has finished her novel. She is now working on a non-fiction collection as well as her critical monograph, Haudenosaunee Good Mind: Combating Literary Erasure and Genocide of American Indian Presence with Literature Curriculum and Literary Criticism. Her short story collection was a finalist for the Louise Meriwether first book prize.