The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature

"Navajo artist and writer Esther Belin and her coeditors compile a marvelously comprehensive anthology of Navajo literature, comprising a mix of familiar authors and bright new voices. Readers will come away with a sense of the tremendous diversity in a seemingly small corner of the Native literary world."--Publisher's Weekly

"This collection is like sitting in a circle with those Diné writers and poets who have long inspired many of us, especially those of us who grew up writing and listening in the Southwest, in the territory influenced by four sacred mountains that bear symbolic and literal significance to all things and thoughts Diné. In the inspirational gathering in these pages, we can hear many voices and feel how the land rises up beneath to embrace us with knowledge and beauty, and how it continues across the horizon to meet the sky. These voices include crucial roots of American literature.

The publication of Blackhorse Mitchell's Miracle Hill made students at the Institute of American Indian Arts proud when it was published. It was a first. Grey Cohoe was also a student there and created art and writing with an intense focus and deliberate renderings based in his love of Diné bizaad. A few years later, into the seventies, Gloria Emerson and her knowledge of philosophy and arts shifted perceptions, grew fresh vision in times that were forcing the People away from themselves. Nia Francisco, Luci Tapahonso, Laura Tohe, Rex Lee Jim and many others made a distinct path through a beautiful and fracturing world to reach the forming world that would hold the children and grandchildren. And now we have the voices of those who emerged--from Sherwin Bitsui, Esther Belin, and Elizabeth Woody to Jake Skeets. This collection is essential to American literature and should be required for anyone studying American, First Nations, or world literature."--Joy Harjo, U.S. Poet Laureate