Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton: Shapes of Native Nonfiction

The Seattle Public Library - Author Readings and Library Events

ABOUT THE BOOK: Just as a basket's purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, the editors have curated an exciting collection of imaginative, world-making lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island into a well-crafted basket. Shapes of Native Nonfiction features a dynamic combination of established and emerging Native writers, including Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Terese Marie Mailhot, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Eden Robinson, and Kim TallBear. Their ambitious, creative, and visionary work with genre and form demonstrate the slippery, shape-changing possibilities of Native stories. Considered together, they offer responses to broader questions of materiality, orality, spatiality, and temporality that continue to animate the study and practice of distinct Native literary traditions in North America. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS: Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, Artist Trust, 4Culture, and Potlatch Fund. Elissa is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University. Theresa Warburton lives on Lummi/Nooksack/Coast Salish territory in Bellingham, WA. She just completed a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Native and Indigenous Literatures at Brown University and, in the fall, will return to Western Washington University as an Associate Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty in Canadian Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her book Other Worlds Here: Answering Native Women’s Writing in Contemporary Anarchist Movements will be published by Northwestern University Press in 2020. Her writing has appeared in Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, and Upping the Anti. Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher. A lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and The Institute of American Indian Arts. Da’ is Eastern Shawnee. She is a recipient of the Native American Arts and Cultures Fellowship, an Artist Trust Fellowship, and fellowships from Hugo House and the Jack Straw Writers Program. Her first book, Tributaries, won the 2016 American Book Award. Her newest book is Instruments of the True Measure, published by the University of Arizona Press. Ruby Hansen Murray is the winner of the Montana Nonfiction Prize, Native Creative Development and Artist Trust GAP grants, awarded fellowships at Hedgebrook, Ragdale and VONA. Her work appears inNative Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversation, Moss, World Literature Today, CutBank, About Place and The Rumpus. She received an MFA from The Institute of American Indian Arts. She’s a citizen of the Osage Nation who lives in the lower Columbia River estuary