Choctaw satirist D.L. Birchfield is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma College of Law and is Professor of Native American Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. He has also taught American Indian studies at Cornell University, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He has served as book review editor for Studies In American Indian Literatures (SAIL), Native Americas, and News From Indian Country, and is a former editor of Camp Crier at the Oklahoma City Native American Center.

His Oklahoma Basic Intelligence Test (Greenfield Review Center, 1998) won the First Book Award For Prose from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, and his Field of Honor (U of OK P, 2004) won the Writer of the Year award from Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers & Storytellers and the Spur Award for Best First Novel from Western Writers of America.His other books include Black Silk Handkerchief: A Hom-Astubby Mystery (U of OK P, 2006) and nineteen textbooks for children from educational publishers.

He was a founding member of the National Advisory Caucus of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers & Storytellers and was General Editor of the eleven-volume Encyclopedia of North American Indians (Marshall Cavendish, 1997). In 2007 he was the Distinguished Lecturer at the 84th annual convention of the Central States Anthropological Society. His most recent book, How Choctaws Invented Civilization and Why Choctaws Will Conquer The World (U of NM P, 2007), treats American history, American Indian law and policy, Choctaw history, and academe as objects of satire.