Poetry. Native American Studies. Winner of the North American Native Authors First Book Award. Deborah Miranda's INDIAN CARTOGRAPHY provides a psychic and emotional remapping of the Native American world of the West Coast. In lyric verse that is sometimes spare, sometimes dramatic, Miranda charts a homeward journey through the heart's territory --a land that has long been torn, disrupted, and colonized in the harshest sense of that word --Janice Gould. The first poem grabbed my wrist and held me for the duration. The prose is equally alive and its images have the precision and the edge of the finest poetry. Seamless back and forth journey from one little girl to another, one woman to another, one memory to another. All distinct yet connected. One long scream from a heart who will not stop living, whose life is an affirmation of survival --Wendy Rose. Miranda's poetry and essays have appeared in Bricolage, Calyx, Calloo, The Cimarron Review, Raven Chronicles, and Soujourner.

Indian Cartography

Literature & Fiction

Miranda, Deborah A.

Poetry

The Greenfield Review Press

This beautiful and devastating book—part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir—should be required reading for anyone seeking to learn about California Indian history, past and present. Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone Costanoan Esselen family as well as the experience of California Indians as a whole through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems. The result is a work of literary art that is wise, angry, and playful all at once, a compilation that will break your heart and teach you to see the world anew.

Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Heyday

How does a damaged child grow up to be a loving, strong adult woman? These poems explore survivorship, tracing an American Indian woman's life from conception to mid-life. Along the way such themes as domestic violence, abandonment, racism, rape, addiction, marriage, motherhood, and falling in love with another Indian woman are addressed in lyric poetry. These poems teach us how to survive destruction without becoming destroyers ourselves; how the elements of earth, love, community and work nurture creation and manifest hope.

The Zen of La Llorona

Salt Pub

The poems in Raised by Humans are about surviving childhood and colonization. Childhood did not agree with Deborah Miranda, mostly because the adult humans in charge of her life were not prepared to manage their own lives, let alone the life of a human-in-training. Humans raised Deborah, but it wasn’t a humane childhood. 
This poetry collection is also about how indigenous people survive civilization and become readers and writers of the same alphabet that colonized their culture. The complexity of being forced to find her way into relationship with the very people or cultures that have hurt/raised Miranda is a paradox at the heart of her poetry, which pushes language past what Miranda calls the “alphabet of walls.”

Raised by Humans: Poems

Tia Chucha

"These poems explore interlocking themes of sacrifice-willing and forced-and the sacred dimension of nature and the need for spiritual healing in a world suffering from the aftereffects of slavery and genocide, as well as homophobia and environmental damage. Many of the poems describe subjects in the Virginia Appalachian region as well as the author's indigenous Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen California coastal homeland"--

Altar for Broken Things: Poems

BkMk Press