Native American Heritage Month-Poetry Reading

Join Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez, Deborah A. Miranda, and Linda Hogan to celebrate the publication of the poetry collection A Light to Do Shellwork By: Poems by Georgiana Valoyce–Sanchez, on Zoom as they read their work in honor of Native American Heritage Month.

 

Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez, author of A Light to Do Shellwork By: Poems (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2022), is a descendant of Islander and Coastal Chumash Peoples from her father’s lineage, and O’odham (Akimel and Tohono) from her mother’s lineage.

Currently, she is an enrolled member of The Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation and chair of the Chumash Women’s Elders Council for the Wishtoyo Foundation.

Formerly, Valoyce-Sanchez was an instructor at California State University, Long Beach, where she taught for their American Indian Studies Program, including two classes she designed: “World Genocides: An American Indian Perspective,” designed in collaboration with graduate student Anna Nazarian-Peters, and “Conduits of California Indian Cultures: Art, Music, Dance and Storytelling.” After 27 years with CSULB, she retired from teaching in 2014.

In addition, she was a board member for many years at the California Indian Storytelling Association, and she continues to be an advocate for California Indian languages and sacred sites. 

Her poem “I Saw My Father Today” is on display at the Embarcadero Muni/BART station as one of twelve poems cast in bronze and placed prominently in San Francisco. 

 

Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California, with Santa Ynez Chumash ancestry. In addition to Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award), she is also the author of four poetry collections (Indian Cartography, The Zen of La Llorona, Raised by Humans, and Altar for Broken Things). 

In 2021, she resigned from her tenured teaching position at Washington and Lee University to focus on scholarships and poetry involving Indigenous California’s history and literatures.

Miranda’s current project is a collection of essays based on the stories of Isabel Meadows, an Indigenous woman born in Carmel, 1846, who left behind extensive documentation of Indigenous cultures and histories in and around Carmel Mission in California.

 

Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw novelist, essayist, and environmentalist. She was born in Denver, Colorado, where she earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs and an MA in English and creative writing from the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Hogan is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Seeing Through the Sun (1985), the winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and The Book of Medicines (1993), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and recipient of the Colorado Book Award.

Recognized for her contributions to indigenous literature, Hogan was inducted into the Chickasaw Nation Hall of Fame in 2007.

In addition to her writing, she is also an instructor, teaching creative writing workshops for students of all ages, and a lecturer, frequently participating at national and international conferences.