Northern Arizona Book Festival: Friday Night Features

The Northern Arizona Book Festival proudly presents a reading with
BOJAN LOUIS (Diné) is the author of the poetry collection Currents (BkMk Press 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, and the nonfiction chapbook Troubleshooting Silence in Arizona (The Guillotine Series 2012). His fiction has appeared in Ecotone, Numéro Cinq Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review; nonfiction in Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. Louis has been a resident at The MacDowell Colony and was the inaugural Virginia G. Piper Fellow-in-Residence at Arizona State University. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona. Louis is a recent recipient of the NEA Fellowship in Poetry.

Sasha LaPointe is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribe. Native to the Pacific Northwest, she draws inspiration from her coastal heritage as well as her life in the city. She writes with a focus on trauma and resilience, ranging topics from PTSD, sexual violence, the work her great grandmother did for the Lushootseed language revitalization, to loud basement punk shows and what it means to grow up mixed heritage. With strange obsessions revolving around Twin Peaks, the Seattle music scene, and Coast Salish Salmon Ceremonies, Sasha explores her own truth of indigenous identity in the Coast Salish territory.
Her memoir Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk was published by Counterpoint Press on March 8, 2022.
Her collection of poetry, Rose Quartz will be published by Milkweed in Spring, 2023.

Brendan Shay Basham (Diné) is Tó tsohnii and Bit’ahnii, born for bilagáana. A fiction writer, poet, educator, and former chef, Brendan was born in Alaska and raised in northern Arizona. He received his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and his debut novel, Swim Home to the Vanished, is forthcoming from Harper Books/HarperCollins, in 2023.
His prose and poetry have appeared in Puerto del Sol, Santa Fe Literary Review, Yellow Medicine Review, and Juked, among others. He is a recipient of Poetry Northwest’s inaugural James Welch Prize for Indigenous Writers, two Writing By Writers Fellowships, the Truman Capote Trust Fellowship, and the Ucross Foundation’s first Native American Literary Award.
Brendan is a creative writing faculty member at The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and UNR at Lake Tahoe. He now resides in Baltimore where he runs a make-believe café.