Whereas under normal circumstances the 2020 Eliza So Fellowship Reading would be held in person, in Missoula, with limited seating, COVID The Terrible has rendered event capacity infinite. Join Submittable online for a celebratory reading in honor Native American writers, in partnership with our friends at the Montana Book Festival.
2020 Eliza So Fellow Tiffany Midge will share from her manuscript The Urban NDN Women’s Guide to Dating, about which judge Heather Cahoon said: “While distinctly Native, both the characters and the writing of this book-in-progress help broaden and add nuance to the public’s oft-held, one-dimensional ideas about American Indians.” Tiffany will be joined by 2020 fellowship finalists Chelsea Hicks and Shaina Nez, and runners-up, Casandra Lopez and Ruby Hansen Murray.
**Find out more about reading participants below, join our Facebook event, and register today. Please note that registration is required for all Montana Book Festival Events.
Event: Eliza So Fellowship Reading with Tiffany Midge
Date: Thursday, September 11, 2020
Time: 3PM MDT
Tiffany Midge is a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and raised by wolves in the Pacific Northwest. A former humor columnist for Indian Country Today, she taught writing and composition for Northwest Indian College, and served as poet laureate for Moscow, Idaho. Her books include The Woman Who Married a Bear (winner of the Kenyon Review Earthworks Prize for Indigenous Poetry and a Western Heritage Award), and Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed (winner of the Diane Decorah Memorial Poetry Award). Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, the Offing, Waxwing, World Literature Today, Lit Hub, First American Art Magazine, and more. Her humor memoir is Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s (University of Nebraska Press). Midge’s McSweeney’s essay, “Open Letter to White Women Concerning the Handmaid’s Tale and America’s Historical Amnesia,” won a 2019 Pushcart Prize and her subversively comic collection of poems, Horns, is forthcoming from Spokane’s Scablands Books. Midge was the 2019 Simons Public Humanities fellow for University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities. She’s appeared on LiveWire with Luke Burbank, broadcast interviews with Tara Gatewood for Native America Calling, and Rosanna Deerchild’s CBC Radio One Without Reservation. Midge aspires to be the Distinguished Writer in Residence for Seattle’s Space Needle and considers her contribution to humanity to be her sparkly personality. Visit her website.
Chelsea T. Hicks (Osage, Pawhuska District) is a writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area with work published in McSweeney’s, the Believer, Indian Country Today, Yellow Medicine Review, The Rumpus, SF Weekly and elsewhere. She is a recent graduate from the IAIA Master’s of Fine Arts program in creative writing, where she studied literary fiction. She works in language revitalization as an instructor of Wahzhazhe ie [[WahZHAzhe EE-ugh or the Osage language]] and teaches second language acquisition practices that she learned as an immersion instructor at UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis. Currently she resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she earned an MA in English from UC Davis. Her dream is to publish several books, particularly, she hopes, one of them entirely in Wahzhazhe ie.
Shaina A. Nez is ‘Áshįįhi born for Táchii’nii. Her maternal grandfather’s clan is Ta’neeszahnii and Kin łichii’nii is her paternal grandfather’s clan. She is from Lukachukai, Arizona and currently lives in Mentmore, New Mexico. Nez received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts with her focus in Creative Nonfiction. She is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ: Diné Writers’ Collective and a board member for the Thunderbird Reading Series. Nez is a BFA Program Coordinator at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona. Nez is a finalist for the 2020 Eliza So Fellowship for her work entitled, “Sun Child.”
Casandra López is a California Indian (Cahuilla/Tongva/Luiseño) and Chicana writer. She’s the author of the poetry collection, Brother Bullet and has been selected for residencies with Storyknife, Hedgebrook and Headlands Center for the Arts. Her memoir-in-progress, A Few Notes on Grief was granted a 2019 James W. Ray Venture Project Award. She’s a founding editor of As/ Us and teaches at Northwest Indian College.
Ruby Hansen Murray is the winner of the Montana Nonfiction Prize and Oregon Writers Colony Contest in Nonfiction, awarded fellowships at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Ragdale, Hedgebrook, and Fishtrap. See her work in High Desert Journal, Seventh Wave, Moss, Exquisite Vessel: Shapes of Native Nonfiction, Native: Voices, Indigenous American Poetry, World Literature Today, CutBank, and The Rumpus. A citizen of the Osage Nation with West Indian roots, she received an MFA from The Institute of American Indian Arts. Visit her website.
We’ll look forward to seeing you soon! And please support the Montana Book Festival, our event partner.
Rachel Mindell is Senior Editor for Submittable's Marketing Team. She also writes and teaches poetry. You can find Rachel's creative work here: rachelmindell.com