Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation in California, with Santa Ynez Chumash ancestry. Her hybrid collection Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. In 2022, the 10th anniversary edition of Bad Indians was released, with 50+ additional pages of material. She is also the author of four poetry collections (Indian Cartography, The Zen of La Llorona, Raised by Humans, and Altar for Broken Things) and co-editor of the Lambda finalist Sovereign Erotics: An Anthology of Two-Spirit Literature. Emerita at Washington and Lee University, where she was Thomas H. Broadus Endowed Chair of English, Deborah continues to guest lecture, teach poetry and memoir workshops, and explore experimental storytelling techniques on the page. She has taught workshops at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at Oregon State University/Cascades, The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and private settings. Deborah’s current project is a collection of essays, poems and collages based on the stories of Isabel Meadows, an Indigenous culture-bearer born in 1846 in the aftermath of the Carmel Mission in California. Deborah and wife Margo Solod live in Eugene, Oregon not far from where they met at a writing workshop on the McKenzie River 30 years ago.
Deborah Miranda
