Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1999 Since the 1968 publication of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, a new generation of Native American storytellers has chosen writing over oral traditions. While their works have found an audience by observing many of the conventions of the mainstream novel, Native American written narrative has emerged as something distinct from the postmodern novel with which it is often compared. In Dreams of Fiery Stars, Catherine Rainwater examines the novels of writers such as Momaday, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich and contends that the very act of writing narrative imposes constraints upon these authors that are foreign to Native American tradition. Their works amount to a break with—and a transformation of—American Indian storytelling. The book focuses on the agenda of social and cultural regeneration encoded in contemporary Native American narrative, and addresses key questions about how these works achieve their overtly stated political and revisionary aims. Rainwater explores the ways in which the writers "create" readers who understand the connection between storytelling and personal and social transformation; considers how contemporary Native American narrative rewrites Western notions of space and time; examines the existence of intertextual connections between Native American works; and looks at the vital role of Native American literature in mainstream society today.

This is a collection of fifteen essays which expose weaknesses in western epistemological frames of reference that for centuries have limited our views, and, thus, our experiences of animal being, including our own. The volume contributes to current discussions of new ways of seeing the other inhabitants of this world and more effective ways of sharing the world with them. The contributors draw on and complement the growing field of ecocriticism, but because the contributors draw on an array of disciplinary and cultural perspectives, it will appeal to a wide audience, ranging from literary scholars, philosophers, art historians, anthropologists, and cultural historians (including graduate and undergraduate students in all these disciplines), to laypersons interested in nature writing and environmental issues.

Fluctuating Life is a book of sixty (60) poems by Joshua Spencer, depicting, symbolically, the struggles, triumphs and jubilation of the author. Joshua Spencer, a teacher with the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), highlights the challenges, triumphs and jubilation, experienced throughout his life's existence, both in the Caribbean and North America. The work is perforated throughout with symbols, metaphors, personifications, similes, and so on. Joshua Spencer eloquently and touchingly entraps, captivates and motivates his audience's thought processes, to share in his challenges of love, perceived discrimination, economic deprivation and his will in overcoming a serious illness experienced. These poems, a direct experience of his winding life ́s journey, serve as great motivational tools for all who have encountered, or are currently facing numerous struggles and setbacks in life. You will learn how to triumph, how to be resilient! It is also a terrific vehicle of education for adolescents, young adults, and the inexperienced of society. Students of Literature and History will gain significantly from reading and studying from Fluctuating Life as will scholars and individuals of varying backgrounds and cultures.

Thomas King is the first Native writer to generate widespread interest in both Canada and the United States. He has been nominated twice for Governor General's Awards, and his first novel, Medicine River, has been transformed into a CBC movie. His books have been reviewed in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The Globe and Mail, and People magazine. King is also the author of the serialized radio series The Dead Dog Café and is an accomplished photographer. Border Crossings is the first full-length study to explore King's art. Davidson, Walton, and Andrews employ a framework of postcolonial and border studies theory to examine the concepts of nation, race, and sexuality in King's work. They examine how King's art routinely explores cross-cultural dynamics, including Native rights and race relations, American and Canadian cultural interaction, and the artistic traditions of Europe and North America. The authors argue that, by situating these concepts within a comic framework, King avoids the polemics that often surface in cultural critiques. His writing engages, entertains, and educates. This provocative analysis of King's art reads across cultures and between borders, and makes an important contribution to the study of Native writing, Canadian and American literature, border studies, and humour studies.

"The first comprehensive study of North American Indigenous languages as the basis of textualized orality in Indigenous literatures in English. Drawing on a significant Indigenous language structure -- the holophrase (one-word sentence) -- Neuhaus proposes "holophrastic reading" as a culturally specific reading strategy for orality in Indigenous writing. In readings of works by Ishmael Alunik (Inuvialuit), Alootook Ipellie (Inuit), Richard Van Camp (Dogrib), Thomas King (Cherokee), and Louise Bernice Halfe (Cree), she demonstrates that (para)holophrases -- the various transformations of holophrases into English-language discourse -- textualize orality in Indigenous literatures by grounding it in Indigenous linguistic traditions. Neuhaus's discussion points to the paraholophrase, the functional equivalent of the holophrase, as a central discourse device in Indigenous writing and as a figure of speech in its own right. Building on interdisciplinary research, this groundbreaking study not only links oral strategies in Indigenous writing to Indigenous rhetorical sovereignty, but also points to ancestral language influences and Indigenous rhetoric more generally as areas for future research"--Cover.

American women writers have long been creating an extraordinarily diverse and vital body of fiction, particularly in the decades since World War II. Recent authors have benefited from the struggles of their predecessors, who broke through barriers that denied women opportunities for self-expression. This reference highlights American women writers who continue to build upon the formerly male-dominated canon. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for more than 60 American women writers of diverse ethnicity who wrote or published their most significant fiction after World War II. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes:^L^DBLA brief biography^L^DBLA discussion of major works and themes^^DBLA survey of the writer's critical reception^L^DBLA bibliography of primary and secondary sources

I come from a family of high achievers and writers. My father, Alfredo Holguin Pombo, was president of a Mortgage Company and vice-president of El Banco de Colombia. He taught me to love poetry; my mother, Beatrice Murray Fairbanks de Holguin Cayzer wrote a newspaper column Buzzing With Bea for the Palm Beach Daily News for a period of fourteen years and four books, including Tales of Palm Beach. My aunt Elaine Murray Stone has written twenty books among them a biography on Mother Theresa. Both my grandfathers were Ambassadors, my cousin Jorge Holguin, may he rest in peace, owned a Theatre Company and wrote books, among them MadreSelva; my great grandfather was president of Colombia. I am related to three other Colombian Presidents, to William Prescott who wrote The History of the Conquest of Mexico and Peru in the 1800s; to Rafael Pombo, my great-great uncle who wrote Nursery Rhymes which are still read today by Colombian children; to Jonathan Fairbanks who built the oldest wooden frame house in the U.S.A. (Dedham, Mass.) and to Empress Eugenie Bonaparte, wife of Napoleon III. I have often wondered how Im going to achieve as much as these and other family members. With these two books of English and Spanish poetry I hope to become a distinguished member of my family. I was married for twenty-two years to the artist Ricardo Morales-Hendry and we have two daughters: Vanessa and Veronica and a grandson, Tristan Anthony Virgo. I currently reside in West Palm Beach, Florida. U.S.A. ***This book was given a 4-star rating by Amazon BOOK REVIEW "A slight collection of lyric musings on lifes grand passions. When the reader conjures an image of poetry, one would imagine the specimens in this tiny volume would come to mind. Morales-Hendry uses traditional verse forms like the sonnet and devices such as end rhyme to convey the ever-classic themes of love and desire for most of the pieces. The only characteristic slightly distinguishing this from the norm of self-published American verse is that the collections second half is Spanish poems, reflecting the poets bilingualism and joint Colombian and American heritage, of which, according to her authors note, she is particularly proud. The English poems brim with emotion, mostly centering on love in its more accustomed formsbetween man and woman, parent and childwith a couple humorous pieces exploring the relations of domesticated mammals (Cookie and Spooky, Love and the Conqueror) tossed in for levity. Some of the love poems are proscriptive, offering recipe-like instructions for relational harmony (The MiniLove Lesson) and satisfying sex (The Love Lesson), while others wax on, painting the page with lots of one-dimensional moons, sky, fire and stars. --Kirkus Discoveries