Seven Hands, Seven Hearts includes the entirety of Elizabeth Woody's highly acclaimed first book of poems, Hand into Stone - winner of the American Book Award - as well as new poems, stories, and essays. The work is united by common themes: a rootedness in the Northwest landscape, the histories of her ancestors, and the ongoing struggle to define what it means to be a tribal member, an American, and a woman at the end of the twentieth century.

Hearts and Hands deals with many of the difficult issues addressed in Luis Rodríguez’s memoir of gang life, Always Running, but with a focus on healing through community building. Empowered by his experiences as a peacemaker with gangs in Los Angeles and Chicago, Rodríguez offers a unique book of change. He makes concrete suggestions, shows how we can create nonviolent opportunities for youth today, and redirects kids into productive and satisfying lives. And he warns that we sacrifice community values for material gain when we incarcerate or marginalize people already on the edge of society. His interest in dissolving gang influence on black and latino kids is personal as well as societal; his son, to whom he dedicates Hearts and Hands, is currently serving a prison sentence for gang-related activity. With anecdotes, interviews, and time-tested guidelines, Hearts and Hands makes a powerful argument for building and supporting community life.

An accessible introduction to a wide range of contemporary poetry by Native Americans

As ecofeminism continues to gain attention from multiple academic discourses, the field of literary criticism has been especially affected by this philosophy/social movement. Scholars using ecofeminist literary criticism are making new and important arguments concerning literature across the spectrum and issues of environment, race, class, gender, sexuality, and other forms of oppression. The essays in New Directions in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism highlight the intersections of these oppressions through the works of different authors including Barbara Kingsolver, Ruth Ozeki, Linda Hogan and Flora Nwapa, and demonstrate the expansion of ecofeminist literary criticism to a more global scale as well as important connections with the field of environmental justice. This collection offers fresh insight and expands the important discussion surrounding the field of ecofeminism and literature.

The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States Since 1945 is the first major volume of its kind to focus on Native literatures in a postcolonial context. Written by a team of noted Native and non-Native scholars, these essays consider the complex social and political influences that have shaped American Indian literatures in the second half of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on core themes of identity, sovereignty, and land. In his essay comprising part I of the volume, Eric Cheyfitz argues persuasively for the necessary conjunction of Indian literatures and federal Indian law from Apess to Alexie. Part II is a comprehensive survey of five genres of literature: fiction (Arnold Krupat and Michael Elliott), poetry (Kimberly Blaeser), drama (Shari Huhndorf), nonfiction (David Murray), and autobiography (Kendall Johnson), and discusses the work of Vine Deloria Jr., N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Sherman Alexie, among many others. Drawing on historical and theoretical frameworks, the contributors examine how American Indian writers and critics have responded to major developments in American Indian life and how recent trends in Native writing build upon and integrate traditional modes of storytelling. Sure to be considered a groundbreaking contribution to the field, The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States Since 1945 offers both a rich critique of history and a wealth of new information and insight.

Tribal histories suggest that Indigenous peoples from many different nations continually allied themselves for purposes of fortitude, mental and physical health, and creative affiliations. Such alliance building, Molly McGlennen tells us, continues in the poetry of Indigenous women, who use the genre to transcend national and colonial boundaries and to fashion global dialogues across a spectrum of experiences and ideas. One of the first books to focus exclusively on Indigenous women’s poetry, Creative Alliances fills a critical gap in the study of Native American literature. McGlennen, herself an Indigenous poet-critic, traces the meanings of gender and genre as they resonate beyond nationalist paradigms to forge transnational forms of both resistance and alliance among Indigenous women in the twenty-first century. McGlennen considers celebrated Native poets such as Kimberly Blaeser, Ester Belin, Diane Glancy, and Luci Tapahonso, but she also takes up lesser-known poets who circulate their work through social media, spoken-word events, and other “nonliterary” forums. Through this work McGlennen reveals how poetry becomes a tool for navigating through the dislocations of urban life, disenrollment, diaspora, migration, and queer identities. McGlennen’s Native American Studies approach is inherently interdisciplinary. Combining creative and critical language, she demonstrates the way in which women use poetry not only to preserve and transfer Indigenous knowledge but also to speak to one another across colonial and tribal divisions. In the literary spaces of anthologies and collections and across social media and spoken-word events, Indigenous women poets are mapping cooperative alliances. In doing so, they are actively determining their relationship to their nations and to other Indigenous peoples in uncompromised and uncompromising ways.

Written by scholars actively producing Native art resources, this book guides readers--students, educators, collectors, and the public--in how to learn about Indigenous cultures as visualized in our creative endeavors.