S205B. When Writing Becomes a Movement: Indigenous Women Storytelling Meets Social Justice

Oregon Ballroom 201-202, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2
Saturday, March 30, 2019
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

 

Debra Magpie Earling, Jennifer Foerster, and Eden Robinson each read from their own work, followed by a discussion on how storytelling reflects and can sometimes drive action in native communities by becoming a means of expressing and unearthing histories and traumas buried, erased, or simply not listened to.


Participants

Debra Magpie Earling is Bitterroot Salish. Her novel Perma Red won the Western Writers Association Spur Award, WWA’s Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for Best First Novel, a WILLA Literary Award, and the American Book Award. She collaborated with artist Peter Koch on The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. She is the recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship. Perma Red is currently being adapted for a television series.
Jennifer Elise Foerster serves as Interim Director of the Institute of American Indian Arts’ MFA Low-Residency Program, where she also teaches, and codirects an arts mentorship program for Mvskoke youth in Oklahoma. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, she is the author of Leaving Tulsa and Bright Raft in the Afterweather, both published by the University of Arizona Press. Jennifer earned her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts and her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver.
Eden Robinson is a Haisla/Heiltsuk author who grew up in Haisla, British Columbia. Her first book, Traplines, a collection of short stories, won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1998. Monkey Beach, her first novel, was shortlisted for both the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction in 2000 and won the BC Book Prizes' Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her novel Son of a Trickster was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Her latest novel is its sequel, Trickster Drift.
#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center