Deborah A. Miranda is the author of two poetry collections, Indian Cartography [Greenfield Review Press, 1999] which won the Diane Decorah Award for First Book from the Native Writer’s Circle of the Americas, and The Zen of La Llorona, nominated for the Lambda Literary Award [Salt Publishing, 2004].  Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California, and is of Chumash ancestry as well.  She is currently finishing “Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir,” a collection of stories, poems, Mission documents, her Esselen grandfather’s tape-recorded histories, government records, newspaper articles, and her own experiences as a mixedblood California Indian woman in the 21st century, as well as a book of poems titled “Raised By Humans.”  As Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, Deborah teaches Creative Writing (poetry and memoir), composition, and a variety of literatures concerned with race, gender and ethnicity.