Diné Bikéyah, Bee Hózhó (From Beauty is the Land) – Writing Workshop

What is our relationship to the land? How is our relationship affected by climate change? Join us for an interactive writing workshop about the past, present, and future of Dinétah, with poet and artist Amber McCrary and creative writing professor Shaina Nez. We will explore how writing can help us understand the environmental challenges shaping our landscape. Together we will read poems and stories from The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature and create our own poems and stories. Participants will receive a free copy of The Diné Reader and lunch!

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AMBER MCCRARY is a Diné poet, zinester, feminist and artist. She is Red House born for Mexican people. McCrary is the owner and founder of Abalone Mountain Press, a press dedicated to publishing Indigenous voices. She is a board member of the Northern Arizona Book Festival, the AZ Humanities 2022 Rising Star of the year, and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation LIFT awardee. She released a chapbook titled, Electric Deserts! (Tolsun Books). Her poems, interviews and art appear in Yellow Medicine Review, POETRY Magazine, Room Magazine, Poets and Writers Magazine, The Navajo Times and forthcoming in Santa Fe Literary Review. McCrary received her BA from Arizona State University in Political Science with a minor in American Indian Studies, and her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry from Mills College. Read more here: https://ambermccrary.com/about.

SHAINA A. NEZ is Táchii’nii born for Áshhi. She serves Diné College as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and English. Her work has appeared in ‘A Gathering of Native Voices’ (The Massachusetts Review), ‘Nonwhite and Women: 131 Micro-Essays on Being in the World,’ winner of the 2023 Silver IPPY award in the category of Adult Multicultural Nonfiction, ‘Between Pleasure and Pain: An Authentic Voices Anthology’ (Sunday Dinner Publishing), and Issue 14: Indigenous Ecopoetry (Green Linden Press). Nez received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is currently a doctoral candidate in Justice Studies with the School of Social Transformation and Inquiry at Arizona State University.

This program is hosted by Arizona Humanities and is made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities United We Stand Initiative.