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Anna writes from her lived experience as a White woman who grew up and worked between postcolonial Diné (Navajo) and White cultures. Through stories and reflection, she explores bicultural belonging and identity, the role of language in identity, and the effects of colonization. In her essay collection, Fissure: A Life Between Cultures, she looks into her settler heritage as the daughter of evangelical missionaries in the Navajo Nation, continuing through her later work in Diné bilingual-bicultural education. She probes how colonization has been part of systemic racism in the US and the debt she may owe to the Indigenous culture that continues to play a part in her life. She identifies is as a Third Culture Kid (TCK) and a cisgender lesbian.

 

Six of the twelve essays in Fissure were previously published in the anthology Fertile and in the literary journals Solstice, DoveTales, Isthmus, and Clockhouse. "Naturalization" was notable in Best American Essays 2014. Other books include To Drink from the Silver Cup: From Faith Through Exile and Beyond, a memoir about the intersectionality of religion and sexuality; and Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living, a biography of of the Holocaust survivor and author of Man's Search for Meaning. Other esssays, poems and stories have been published in Fireweed, Rockhurst Review, Mount Hope Magazine, Spaces, Friends Journal, and Gallup Journey, and anthologized in Wet. Anna also writes a quarterly column in the Gallup Independent.

 

Anna has worked as a writer, translator, editor, linguist, educator, psychotherapist, hospice caregiver, operating room technician, housecleaner, and supermarket cashier. She has been a full-time writer, since 2010 and lives far from her Southwest home in the Danish Village of Elk Horn, Iowa, to be near her daughter and her family.