Indigenous American

Annette Arkeketa

Representative Plays:

Hokti
Ghost Dance

About the Playwright:

Annette Arkeketa is an enrolled member of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma. She is also Muscogee Creek. She conducts professional workshops in poetry, playwriting, the creative process, script consultant, and documentary film making. She is also director of Native American film studies at Comanche Nation College.

LeAnne Howe

Representative Plays:

The Mascot Opera (2008)
Indian Radio Days (1998)
Big PowWow (1987)

About the Playwright:

Poet, fiction writer, filmmaker, and playwright LeAnne Howe was born and raised in Oklahoma and is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She worked as a newspaper journalist for 12 years before earning an MFA from Vermont College. Howe's lyrical poems engage Native American life. She is the author of the poetry collection Evidence of Red: Poems and Prose (2005), which won the Oklahoma Book...

Linda Hogan

Representative Plays:

A Piece of Moon (1981)

About the Playwright:

Linda Hogan was born in 1947, in Denver, Colorado and grew up in Oklahoma. She obtained a M.A. degree from University of Colorado at Boulder in 1978. Hogan is a passionate educator and speaker who has taught at the Indigenous Education Institute and at the University of Colorado. She has spoken at the United Nations Forum and a plenary speaker at the Environmental Literature Conference in Turkey in 2009. Hogan has played a prominent role in the development of contemporary...

E. Donald Two-Rivers

Representative Plays:

Winter Summit or the Bang-Bang Incident
Forked Tongues
Chili Corn
Coyote Sits in Judgment
Shattered Dream
Old Indian Trick (An Old Urban Indian Story as Told by an Old Urban Indian Who May Have Lied)

About the Playwright:

E. Donald "Ed" Two-Rivers, sometimes known as Donald Two-River, was an Anishinaabe (Ojibwa) poet, playwright, and spoken-word performer. Brought up first on the reservation and then in the urban Native community in Chicago, Two-Rivers was an activist...

Diane Glancy

Representative Plays:

The Woman Who Was a Red Deer Dressed for the Deer Dance (1995)
American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays (2002)
Cargo (2006)

About the Playwright:

Proficient in numerous genres—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting—Diane Glancy often creates work that reflects her Native American heritage. Part Cherokee, and of English and German descent, Glancy was born in Kansas City, Missouri. She has served as artist-in-residence for the Oklahoma State Arts Council (traveling...

Jim Northrup

Representative Plays:

Rez Road Follies
Rez Road 2000
Shinnob Jep

About the Playwright:

Jim Northrup (April 28, 1943 – August 1, 2016) was an Anishinaabe (Native American) newspaper columnist, poet, performer, and political commentator from the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation in Minnesota. His Anishinaabe name was "Chibenashi" (from Chi-bineshiinh "Big little-bird").

Links:

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Lynn Riggs

Representative Plays:

Big Lake (1927)
Green Grow the Lilacs (1931)
The Cherokee Night (1936)

About the Playwright:

Lynn Riggs is the Southwest's most important playwright and a significant folk artist. His best-known play, Green Grow the Lilacs, became one of the world's greatest musicals, Oklahoma! Riggs was also a poet but mostly made his living writing Hollywood film scripts. Half of his thirty plays are set in the Southwest, and he vividly depicted life...

Cherríe Moraga

Representative Plays:

The Mathematics of Love (2017)
Digging Up the Dirt (2010)
The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (1995)

Bio:

Cherríe Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, playwright, essayist and memoirist. As a playwright, she has received two Fund for New American Plays Awards, the NEA’s Playwrights’ Fellowship, as well as a Drama-logue and Critics Circle Award, and the Pen West Award. She has published three volumes of plays: Heroes & Saints & Other Plays; The Hungry Woman/Heart of...

Beth Piatote

Representative Plays:

Antíkoni (2018)

Bio:

Beth Piatote is a scholar of Native American/Indigenous literature and law; a creative writer of fiction, poetry, plays, and essays; and an Indigenous language revitalization activist/healer, specializing in Nez Perce language and literature. She is the author of two books: Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), which won an MLA award; and The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the...

Yvette Nolan

Representative Plays:

The Unplugging (2015)

Annie Mae’s Movement (2001)

BLADE (1990)

Bio:

Playwright, director, dramaturg, actor, and educator, Yvette Nolan has contributed substantively to the creation and performance of First Nations Theatre in Canada. She was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan...