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Works

Crevice: A Life Between Worlds

Crevice is a collection of 13 related essays, the winner of the 2024 Kenneth Johnston Nonfiction Book Award and published by Choeofpleirn Press. Through stories and reflection, the book explores bicultural belonging and identity, the role of language in identity, and the effects of colonization. It examines the author's 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. Available everywhere books are sold. 

Crevice: A Life Between Worlds

To Drink from the Silver Cup: From Faith Through Exile and Beyond

The journey of a young lesbian, the daughter of devout missionaries to the Navajo Nation, who walked away from everything she loved in order to be herself. She never stopped longing for home or giving up hope for reconciliation. Read an excerpt and readers' responses by clicking on the link.

In and Out

An essay about the adversities of mission boarding school life in the Navajo Nation as lived by a white girl and as told to her by Navajo friends. Published in Isthmus Issue 6, Special on Politics, 2016.

A Good Stranger

A braided essay weaving together three strands of a search for spiritual identity--Protestant Christian, Navajo, and Jewish. Published in Isthmus Issue 2, Fall/Winter 2014.

Naturalization

An essay about how an interracial relationship lived on in my teaching writing to my African American students. An exploration of cross-cultural identity. In Clockhouse Review, Summer 2013. Listed as Notable in The Best American Essays 2014.

The First Avocado

Award winning montage about mortality through the experience of first tastes. Published in Mount Hope, Fall 2013.

Viktor Frankl: A Life Worth Living

My biography of Viktor Frankl is the story of a man who forged a life of triumph in the crucible of the Holocaust. Viktor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, survived four concentration camps by living his belief that a person can survive the worst situations by finding meaning in them. Written for Young Adults, Viktor Frankl has generated crossover interest among adults and has been used in high school and college classrooms and by adult book groups.