From the Institute
for the Humanities
Paula Gunn Allen, poet, novelist and short-story writer from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and one of the country’s most visible representatives of Native American culture, will be on campus for two weeks this month.
She will be a visiting fellow at the Institute for the Humanities, and will participate in the Modern Language Association’s Regional Conference on “The Status of Multicultural Literatures in the Profession.”
Allen was raised in a small New Mexico village bounded by a Laguna Pueblo reservation on one side and an Acoma reservation on the other.
She is the daughter of a Laguna Pueblo, Sioux and Scottish mother and a Lebanese-American father. Spanish, German, Laguna, English and Arabic all were spoken during her upbringing at home.
Allen holds a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico. She has taught at UCLA since 1982.
In addition to her most recent book, Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Sourcebook, she has published seven volumes of poetry, four volumes of non-fiction and a novel.
She has won numerous prizes for her work, including the 1990 Native American Literature Prize and the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. A new book, Voice of the Turtles: A Century of American Indian Fiction, is forthcoming.
While here, Allen will deliver the Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture, a poetry and fiction reading, at 4 p.m. Thursday (Nov. 10) in Rackham Amphitheater. The reading is free and open to the public.
