Carolyn Dunn

Carolyn Dunn is an American Indian artist of Cherokee, Muskogee Creek, and Seminole descent on her father's side, and is Cajun, French Creole, and Tunica-Biloxi on her mother's. Primarily a poet and a playwright, Carolyn began telling and writing stories at a very young age, being exposed to storytelling traditions from all aspects of her very Southern and very Western background. Her work has been recognized by the Wordcraft Circle of Storytellers and Writers as Book of the Year for poetry (Outfoxing Coyote, 2002) as well as the Year's Best in 1999 for her short story "Salmon Creek Road Kill", Native American Music Awards (for the Mankillers cd Comin to Getcha) and the Humboldt Area Foundation. She has a forthcoming poetry book, Echo Location, in 2009 and her most recent book is Coyote Speaks, native stories for young adult readers, coauthored with Ari Berk (Abrams, 2008). As an academic, Carolyn's work has primarily focused on landscape in American Indian women's literature (poetry, prose, and drama), and urban American Indian identity formation and southeastern American Indian diasporic literary traditions in California. Currently, she is a James Irvine Foundation Fellow at the Center for American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where she is pursuing a doctorate. She has taught and developed university curriculum in American Indian literature (poetry and fiction), history, and theatre; she has adapted and directed numerous radio theatre plays as well as staged productions of traditional stories, poems and songs with the American Indian Theatre Collective, Chapa De Indian Youth Theatre Company, The Los Angeles Theater Project, and directed a staged reading of Arigon Starr's one woman play, The Red Road for Native Voices at The Autry at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles in 2005. Carolyn is currently a Lecturer in the American Indian Studies program at California State University, Long Beach, where she teaches history, literature and film.