Red Indian Road West – Native American Poetry from California

Red Indian Road West
110 Pages
ISBN 9780976867654

"Red Indian Road West is an assertion and a statement saying, 'We have always been here. You will never forget us. You cannot do so.' Indigenous people and their insistent passion. Traveling from inland hills to seashores. Their experiences in hot desert and hard mountain. Vital moments to viral moments like no other, but always within the present one. Karuk. Wintu. Konkow. Pomo. Miwok. Mojave. Chumash. Costanoan Esselen. Ohlone. And more. And more than we can name but which will always be remembered. And later on, the Lakota, Dakota, Cherokee, Wampanoag, and others, so our indigenous essence will always be momentous. Read, listen, hear, and be assured. Know again and always!" — Simon J. Ortiz, author of Out There Somewhere and Men on the Moon

Red Indian Road West is the first anthology to bring work by poets from California tribes together with work by poets from the Native American diaspora in California. Introduced by James Luna, the anthology includes 31 poets from 29 tribes: Indira Allegra, Judi Brannan Armbruster, J.P. Dancing Bear, Nanette Bradley Deetz, E.K. Cooper, Roberta Reyes Cordero, Lucille Lang Day, Natalie Diaz, Carolyn Dunn, Jennifer Elise Foerster, Jewelle Gomez, Janice Gould, Alison Hart, John Hershman, Senna Heyatawin, Dave Holt, Frank LaPena, Sharmagne Leland-St. John, Sal Martinez, Shaunna Oteka McCovey, Stephen Meadows, Deborah A. Miranda, Manny Moreno, Catherine Nelson-Rodriguez, Linda Noel, Wendy Rose, Sylvia Ross, Kurt Schweigman, Marlon Sherman, Kim Shuck, Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez.

Kurt Schweigman

About Kurt Schweigman (Oakland, California Author)

Kurt Schweigman

Kurt Schweigman, co-editor of Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California, has published and performed as Luke Warm Water in the past. His poetry appears in Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets (Michigan State University Press, 2008). He has authored several chapbooks, one of which was awarded an Artists Embassy International Literary/Cultural Award (2013). Kurt was a featured poet at the prestigious Geraldine R. Dodge 12th Biennial Poetry Festival (2008) and was the first spoken-word poet to receive an Archibald Bush Foundation individual artist fellowship in literature (2005). He emerged on the poetry spoken-word scene in the late 1990s and has won several Poetry Slam competitions across the United States and in Germany. He currently resides in Oakland, California. Kurt is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux (Lakota) Tribe.

Lucille Lang Day

About Lucille Lang Day (Co-Author)

Lucille Lang Day

Lucille Lang Day, author of the memoir Married a Fourteen: A True Story, has published ten poetry collections and chapbooks, most recently Becoming an Ancestor and Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems, which won the 2014 Blue Light Poetry Prize. Her first poetry collection, Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope, was selected by Robert Pinsky, David Littlejohn, and Michael Rubin for the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature. She is also a co-editor of the anthology Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California and the author of a children’s book, Chain Letter. Her poems, short stories, and essays have received nine Pushcart Prize nominations and have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies. She is of Wampanoag, British, and Swiss/German descent.