Meet Anna
Anna writes from her lived experience as a White woman who grew up and worked between postcolonial Diné (Navajo) and White cultures. Her most recent book, an essay collection called Crevice: A Life Between Worlds, will be released on May 1, 2025 by Choeofpleirn Press, where it won the Kenneth Johnston Nonfiction Book Award. Through stories and reflection, the book explores bicultural belonging and identity, the role of language in identity, and the effects of colonization. In the collection, Anna examines her settler heritage as the daughter of evangelical missionaries in the Navajo Nation––from an early age and continuing through her later work in Diné bilingual-bicultural education as an adult. She probes how colonization has been part of systemic racism in the US and explores the debt she may owe to the Indigenous culture that continues to play a part in her life. Seven of the thirteen essays in the collection were previously published in the literary journals Solstice, DoveTales, Isthmus, and Clockhouse, in the anthology Fertile, and in the Gallup Independent. "Naturalization" was notable in Best American Essays 2014.
Other books by Anna include To Drink from the Silver Cup: From Faith Through Exile and Beyond, a memoir about the intersectionality of religion, spirituality, and sexuality; and Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living, a biography of the Holocaust survivor and author of Man's Search for Meaning. Other essays, poems and stories have been published in Fireweed, Rockhurst Review, Mount Hope Magazine, Spaces, Friends Journal, and Gallup Journey, and also anthologized in Wet. For several years, Anna wrote a quarterly column in the Gallup Independent.
Anna works full-time as a writer, translator, and editor. She has worked as a linguist, educator, psychotherapist, hospice caregiver, operating room technician, housecleaner, and supermarket cashier. She lives far from her Southwest home in the Danish Village of Elk Horn, Iowa, to be near her daughter and her family. She identifies is as a Third Culture Kid (TCK) and a cisgender lesbian.