Contributor Biographies

Debra K. S. Barker is an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Nation and associate professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where she teaches courses in American Indian literatures. She has published articles on Louise Erdrich, John Steinbeck, the history of the boarding school, and on the trafficking in American Indian art, among other topics.

Susan Berry Brill De Ramírez is a professor of English and teaches Native American literatures, environmental literatures, women's literatures, and literary criticism at Bradley University. She is the author of Contemporary American Indian Literatures & the Oral Tradition (U of Arizona P, 1999), Wittgenstein and Critical Theory (Ohio UP, 1995), and numerous scholarly articles, and is completing a book manuscript on the ethnographic construction of twentieth-century American Indian "autobiographies" and beginning a large project looking at ethics in various storytelling traditions. She relates that her work is deeply informed by her sacred tradition—the Bahá'í' Faith and by her mixed Appalachian/German-Jewish heritage.

Gladys Cardiff is an assistant professor of American literature at Oakland University (Rochester, Michigan) where she teaches courses in creative writing, contemporary poetry, and Native American literatures. She is the author of two collections of poetry: To Frighten a Storm (Copper Canyon Press) and A Bare Unpainted Table (New Issues Press). Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies including: Carriers of the Dream Wheel, Songs from This Earth on Turtles Back, The Remembered Earth, That's What She Said, Harper's Anthology of 20 th Century Native American Poetry, and The Gift of Tongues. She received her MFA at the University of Washington and her doctorate from Western Michigan University. She is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee.

Qwo-Li Driskill is a Cherokee Two-Spirit also of African, Irish, Lenape, Lumbee, and Osage ascent. Hir creative and scholarly work has appeared in several publications including Many Mountains Moving, The Raven Chronicles, Revolutionary Voices, Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry, and Nurturing Native Languages. S/he lives in the Duwamish Nation, currently called Seattle, where s/he is the founder of Knitbone Productions: A First Nations Ensemble.

Denara Hill is currently a doctoral student at University of Nevada Las Vegas with a focus in Chicana/o literature.

Sheila Hassell Hughes holds an interdisciplinary PhD in women's studies from Emory University and is an assistant professor of English and acting director of women's studies. She has published articles on gender, culture, and religion in works by a range of women writers, including Teresa of Avila, Gwendolyn Brooks, Joy Harjo, and Louise Erdrich. She is currently collaborating on a book about the representation of religion in Erdrich's work.

Dean Rader is an assistant professor of English and Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities at the University of San Francisco. He is the coauthor of The World is a Text, (Prentice-Hall 2002), and the coeditor with Janice Gould of Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (U of Arizona P 2003). He is also an associate editor of SAIL.

Michelle Raheja is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Riverside.

Robert Warrior is the author of Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions and, with Paul Chaat Smith, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. He currently directs the Native American Studies program at the University of Oklahoma.