Thomas Davis

Thomas Davis retired as the Provost at Navajo Technical College, a tribally controlled college on the Navajo Nation. He is a poet, scholar, and playwright known for his work for tribal colleges, sustainable development, and high performance computing. He was one of the founders of the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium and helped to found College of the Menominee Nation in Keshena, Wisconsin. He has been the President of two tribal colleges and the Acting President of another one.

He lives with his wife, poet and artist Ethel Mortenson Davis, and two dogs, Pax and Juneau, in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. His last book was In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams (All Things That Matter Press), which won the Edna Ferber Fiction Award for 2019. Previous books included Sustaining the Forest, the People, and the Forest published by State University of New York (SUNY) Press and Salt Bear, published by Four Windows Press in January 2011, a novel for young people about mythological creatures of the American West, including salt bears, jackalopes, and a cactus buck. He has given poetry and dramatic readings at schools and universities throughout the United States as well as in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The Alkali Cliffs was the first novel Davis wrote. Although fiction, it is placed on his Grandma Davis's small farm, long gone, on the adobe flats of North Delta, Colorado where he spent time as a child during the years his mother and father operated Davis Grocery in downtown Delta.

In addition to his four novels, he has had two epic poems published, The Weirding Storm, A Dragon Epic and An American Spirit, An American Epic. The first is a fantasy that tells a tale about a universe where dragons and humans live, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in conflict. An American Spirit is a complex work that weaves the historical takeover of the Alexian Brother's Novitiate by the Menominee Warrior Society with the rise of the far right Posse Comitatus, and the story of a strange cult in Shawano, Wisconsin into a single epic story.