Deborah A Miranda (she/her)

Margo Solod

Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation in California, with Santa Ynez Chumash ancestry, and is Thomas H. Broadus Professor emerita at Washington and Lee University. Her book "Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir" won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award; the tenth anniversary edition of "Bad Indians" was released in 2023. Miranda is the author of four poetry collections and was co-editor for "This Music: Record of a Poet Becoming," by Janice Gould. Deborah's 2027 poetry collection is "Maxanax Chempapísi / Bloodwriting." 

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Awards: PEN Literary Award, I don't see anyplace to correct my address. It needs to also say "Apt 612" or I won't receive mail.

Communities: LGBTQ+, Indigenous or Native American, Mixed Race

Books:

Maxanax Chempapísi / Bloodwriting

Poetry
University of Arizona Press
January 2027
ISBN 9780816558155
Paperback, 84 pages

In Maxanax Chempapísi / Bloodwriting lyric poems exploring Esselen words and concepts traverse a supporting cast of prose poems about contemporary life as a queer, Indigenous recovering academic. Deborah A. Miranda witnesses the lives of women who are lovers, mothers, daughters, sisters, and grandmothers caught in a chain of ongoing apocalypse that stretches from the colonization of North America to the current Anthropocene. These poems are small but potent ceremonies that center relationship as medicinal. They speak of the ugliness of genocide, substance abuse, environmental destruction, and homophobia with searing fury. They linger on the sacred powers found within a river—“A web of fireflies weaving constellations in the alder’s branches”—or the wonder of “The first woman / who stole my heart / rose up / from the earth / like a creation story.” Throughout this collection, images weave connections between women’s bodies and the moon, bodies and earth, bodies and constellations that surround us. Esselen, Miranda’s Indigenous language, acts as a bridge that translates some of these ancient struggles and insights into contemporary images. This collection resists the separation of the body, the spirit, and the sacred. It seeks a reunion of true relationship in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. Miranda balances praise for the burning—but still beautiful and holy—world and grief for the loss of beings and places that cannot be recovered. More/less

Bad Indians (10th Anniversary Edition)

A Tribal Memoir
Memoir / Essays / Creative Nonfiction
Heyday Books
October 2022
ISBN 9781597145862
Hardcover, 304 pages

Newly expanded, this gripping memoir is hailed as essential by the likes of Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and ELLE magazine. Bad Indians--part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir--is essential reading for anyone seeking to learn about California Indian history, past and present. Widely adopted in classrooms and book clubs throughout the United States, Bad Indians--now reissued in significantly expanded form for its 10th anniversary--plumbs ancestry, survivance, and the cultural memory of Native California. In this best-selling, now-classic memoir, Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen family and the experiences of California Indians more widely through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems. This anniversary edition includes several new poems and essays, as well as an extensive afterword, totaling more than fifty pages of new material. Wise, indignant, and playful all at once, Bad Indians is a beautiful and devastating read, and an indispensable book for anyone seeking a more just telling of American history. More/less