Shapes of Native Nonfiction | Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. This item is unavailable.Shapes of Native Nonfiction | Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers

Just as a basket’s purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, the editors have curated an exciting collection of imaginative, world-making lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island into a well-crafted basket. Shapes of Native Nonfiction features a dynamic combination of established and emerging Native writers, including Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Terese Marie Mailhot, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Eden Robinson, and Kim TallBear. Their ambitious, creative, and visionary work with genre and form demonstrate the slippery, shape-changing possibilities of Native stories. Considered together, they offer responses to broader questions of materiality, orality, spatiality, and temporality that continue to animate the study and practice of distinct Native literary traditions in North America.

Elissa Washuta is an assistant professor of English at the Ohio State University. She is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and the author of two books: Starvation Mode: A Memoir of Food, Consumption, and Control (Instant Future-Future Tense Books, 2015); and My Body Is a Book of Rules (Red Hen Press, 2014), named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

Theresa Warburton is an assistant professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Program of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Western Washington University.