MFA Reading Series: Shapes of Native Nonfiction – Deborah Miranda, Theresa Warburton, Elissa Washuta

Deborah A. Miranda is the author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013), recipient of the PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Association, and short-listed for the William Saroyan Literary Award; and four poetry collections: Altar for Broken Things (2020), Raised by Humans (2015), The Zen of La Llorona (2005), and Indian Cartography (1999). She is co-editor of Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature, and her work has appeared in When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: An Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020). She is the Thomas H. Broadus, Jr. Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, where she teaches literature of the margins and creative writing. She is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California.

Theresa Warburton is the author of Other Worlds Here: Honoring Native Women’s Literatures in Contemporary Anarchist Movements (forthcoming, Northwestern University Press). With Elissa Washuta, she is co-editor of Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She is an Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University where she is also affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Canadian-American Studies. She lives on Lummi, Nooksack, and Coast Salish Territories in Bellingham, WA.

Elissa Washuta is the author of the nonfiction collections My Body Is a Book of Rules (2014), Starvation Mode (2018), and White Magic (forthcoming, Tin House Books). With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient, a Creative Capital awardee, and an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University. She is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe.