About
by admin on February 5th, 2011
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Carolyn Dunn is an American Indian artist of Cherokee, Muskogee Creek, and Seminole descent on her father’s side, and is Cajun, French Creole, and Tunica-Biloxi on her mother’s. Primarily a poet and a playwright, Carolyn began telling and writing stories at a very young age, being exposed to storytelling traditions from all aspects of her very Southern and very Western background. Her work has been recognized by the Wordcraft Circle of Storytellers and Writers as Book of the Year for poetry (Outfoxing Coyote, 2002) as well as the Year’s Best in 1999 for her short story “Salmon Creek Road Kill”, Native American Music Awards (for the Mankillers cd Comin to Getcha) and the Humboldt Area Foundation. In addition to Outfoxing Coyote, her books include Through the Eye of the Deer (Aunt Lute Books, 1999), Hozho: Walking in Beauty (McGraw Hill, 2002) and Coyote Speaks (H.N. Abrams, 2008).
As an academic, Carolyn’s work has primarily focused on landscape in American Indian women’s literature (poetry, prose, and drama), and urban American Indian identity formation in California. She received her Doctorate in American Studies (with a focus on American Indian Literature and Theater) from the University of Southern California, where she was a James Irvine Fellow, and an M.A. in American Indian literature and folklore from UCLA. Her essays have appeared in The American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Belles Lettres, and the anthologies American Indian Performing Arts: Critical Directions, Reading Native American Women, and Cultural Representation and Contestation in Native America, among others. She has taught and developed university curriculum in American Indian literature (poetry and fiction), history, and theatre; she has adapted and directed numerous radio theatre plays as well as staged productions of traditional stories, poems and songs with the American Indian Theatre Collective, Chapa De Indian Youth Theatre Company, The Los Angeles Theater Project, and directed a staged reading of Arigon Starr‘s one woman play, The Red Road for Native Voices at The Autry at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles in 2005. Her fiction and poetry appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Coyote Road (Viking, 2007) and Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest (Viking, 2004). Her plays have been produced all over the country; her most recent play, The Frybread Queen, premiers in Los Angeles in March 2011, after a developmental production at Montana Repertory Theater and at the La Jolla Playhouse. The play has been called “one of the most talked about new Native theater pieces in the United States.” (Broadway World).
Currently, Carolyn is a Visiting Lecturer at San Francisco State University, where she teaches American Indian Oral Literature, and serves as the Managing Director of the American Indian Resource Center and the Ethnic Resource Centers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives in the redwood forest with her family.
About Carolyn’s work:
“It was ultimately the plot that intrigued me so much, because aside from a wonderful play featuring four native women facing family and generational issues, it’s also simply good mystery and storytelling.” Jere Hodgin
{Carolyn} Dunn’s language is a perfect blend of the matter-of-fact and the mystic. Her stories are political, sensual, personal, and if not universal, they’re certainly not specific to only one gender’s or one community’s experience. Tears, joy, rage, mystery, and a desire — no, a need — to understand all stride through the pages of Outfoxing Coyote, but the largest presence is heart: the heart of a poet who shares the gift of her stories with resilient tenderness and unflinching strength. — Charles de Lint
To read Carolyn Dunn’s poetry is to be transported to a realm almost lost in contemporary westernized America, one where the past is ever-present and the mythic walks hand in hand with the quotidian. Drawing on the traditions of her Native American heritage, Dunn portrays a world where the emotions and experiences of today, though rendered with moving immediacy and potency, are part of a continuum extending back into the mists of time – a perspective that imbues them with a resonance both empowering and transcendent. — Rand Johnson