Tacey M. Atsitty, Diné, from Cove, Arizona is Tsénahabiłnii (Sleep Rock People)and born forTa'neeszahnii (Tangle People). She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, the Corson-Browning Poetry Prize, and Morning Star Creative Writing Award. She holds bachelor degrees from Brigham Young University and the Institute of American Indian Arts.

She is a recent graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Cornell University. She currently teaches English and Native American Studies at San Juan College in Farmington, NM. Her work has appeared in Florida Review, Drunken Boat, Talking Stick: Native Arts Quarterly, New Poets of the American West Anthology and other publications. Her chapbook "Amenorrhea" came out February 2009 by Counting Coup Press.

Myla Vicenti Carpio is of the Jicarilla Apache Nation and from Laguna and Isleta Pueblos in New Mexico. After completing her undergraduate work at the University of New Mexico in 1992. Dr. Vicenti Carpio earned a master’s degree in history from Arizona State University.  Continuing her educational career at ASU, Myla went on to receive her Ph.D. in history in 2001.

Myla currently works as an Assistant Professor in the American Indian Studies Department at Arizona State University. Her courses include Introduction to American Indian Studies, Issues in Urban Indian Country, American Indian Studies Research Methods, and Readings in Colonization/Decolonization. Her research areas include Indigenous history, urban issues, gender and sexuality, and decolonization.

"Writing on the Crest of Revolution: A Choctaw in King Abdullah's Court"

LeAnne Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She writes fiction, poetry, screenplays, scholarship, and plays that deal with native experiences. Author of three awarding winning books, (including the American Book Award, and the Oklahoma Book Award). Howe’s fiction appears in Fiction International, Callaloo, Story, Yalobusha Review, Kenyon Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated in France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark.

Recent artistic and scholarly accomplishments include: the William J. Fulbright Scholarship to Amman Jordan, 2010-2011 to research a new novel set during the Arab Revolt in 1917; on March 5, 2011, Howe was Awarded Tulsa Library Trust’s “American Indian Author Award” at Central Library, Tulsa, OK. Returned from Jordan to receive the award.

In June, 2011: NAISA (Native American and Indigenous Studies Association) voted Reasoning Together, The Native Critics Collective, one of the ten most influential books in the first decade of the twenty-first century by the membership of over 800 scholars. Howe’s chapter, “Blind Bread and the Business of Theorymaking By Embarrassed Grief as Told by LeAnne Howe”. . . . appears in the collection - a short story couched within literary criticism. In November 2011, she was named by Maynard Institute for Journalism Education as one of 30 American Indians authors to celebrate the works of, during November’s Native American Heritage Month.

In 2007, Howe appeared on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show on Comedy Central in a news segment about sports mascots titled, Trail of Cheers. [She’s afraid this might be the pinnacle of her career.] She was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, MS, 2006-2007. Her plays have been performed at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and in New York at the Smithsonian.

Currently, when not gallivanting around the Middle East, Howe is a Professor of English, American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, and former Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing. She makes her homes in Ada, Oklahoma; Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, and most recently Amman, Jordan.

Simon J. Ortiz writes poetry and prose that is at once honest and unfettered, and yet challenging. Using the simplest of language, Ortiz evokes the most complex feelings, and often a longing for the experiences about which he writes. In much of his work he maintains a simple tone that belies the adversity of his life. What Ortiz writes is important because he is teaching the art of experience, and doing it through language. Not suprisingly, he believes language is an important vehicle for finding and knowing who we are and professes a strong belief in the power of the oral traditions of his people. Although his words often seem innocent, the observations he makes could only come from one who has known the harshness of reality. That he manages such a firm belief in the power of experience and spirituality in the face of difficulty, is something well worth learning, a lesson that Ortiz, as well as Native Americans have to teach