HIGH POINT, N.C., Nov. 18, 2015 – High Point University will host a presentation by Native American writer Deborah Miranda at 7 p.m. on Dec. 2 in the David L. Francis Lecture Hall at Earl N. Phillips School of Business. The event is free and open to the public. Tickets are not required.
Miranda will read from her mixed-genre collection, “Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir” (2013), which won the Pen-Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Association, and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan Award. She also will meet with HPU’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program and students who read her book in a literature course on American Indian writers this fall.
Dr. Kirstin Squint, assistant professor of English, who has helped organize the event, says it is a special opportunity for her students to interact with Miranda after studying her work and a great chance for students and community members alike to learn more about the impact colonialism had on indigenous people, historically and today.
“As Miranda demonstrates in ‘Bad Indians,’ the impact of abuse by European and U.S. settlers has been far-reaching in American Indian communities, and Miranda continues through her work to create a space of justice in the various communities in which she participates,” Squint says. “I hope that our audience enjoys Miranda’s experimentation with different formal literary techniques as a way of representing both community and individual stories.”
Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California and is the John Lucian Smith Term Professor of English at Washington and Lee University.