"Voices from the Urban Indigenous Campfire"

Poetry, creative writing, and rich stories interlace at Voices from the Urban Indigenous Campfire, a specially-curated celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, featuring three Indigenous creatives.

Award-winning poet Rena Priest (Lummi Nation, Washington State Poet Laureate 2021-2023), first-person novelist Deborah Taffa (Quechan Nation, Laguna Pueblo; Whiskey Tender), and leading playwright Rhiana Yazzie (Navajo, 2020 Steinberg Playwright Award) represent voices reaching well beyond their own tribal affiliations. These distinguished writers delve into tribal identity and the beauty — and tremendous challenges — of keeping culture, land, and traditions close.

About the Performance

Voices from the Urban Indigenous Campfire is a creation of the moment, a bespoke evening of storytelling curated to create a snapshot, a perspective for the Virginia Tech community. Native storytelling is having a moment. For the first time we now have a voice — on stage, on the big and little screens, in literature, and beyond. We are finally beginning to unravel decades of invisibility. Each of the three featured artists was introduced to me through their writing first. The voices from this show present a view from the soul of Native America — the poetry, the theatre, and nonfiction writing. Within these voices you will find the humor, reflection, and spirit that give our communities direction and purpose.

— Andre Bouchard, guest curator

About Rena Priest

Rena Priest is an enrolled member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation. Priest served as the sixth Washington State Poet Laureate (2021-2023) and was named the 2022 Maxine Cushing Gray Distinguished Writing Fellow. She is also the recipient of an Allied Arts Foundation Professional Poets Award, as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Indigenous Nations Poets, Nia Tero, and the Vadon Foundation. 

Her debut collection, Patriarchy Blues, received an American Book Award. Her second collection, Sublime Subliminal, was published as the finalist for the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Her most recent book, Northwest Know-How: Beaches, includes poems, retellings of legends, and fun descriptions of 29 of the most beloved beaches in the Pacific Northwest. Priest’s nonfiction has appeared in High Country News, YES! Magazine, Seattle Met, and elsewhere. She holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. 

About Deborah Taffa

Deborah Jackson Taffa’s recently released memoir, Whiskey Tender, has received praise from the New York Times, Elle magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The book traces how a mixed-tribe native girl — born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico — comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Taffa’s childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. 

Taffa is a citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo. She earned an M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers Workshop and is the director of the M.F.A. in creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She serves as the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine River Styx, and her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, A Public Space, Salon, the Huffington Post, Prairie Schooner, the Best Travel Writing, and other outlets.

About Rhiana Yazzie

A playwright, director, and filmmaker, Rhiana Yazzie serves the artistic director of New Native Theatre, which she started in 2009 as a response to the lack of connection and professional opportunities between Twin Cities theatres and the Native community. The organization offers a new way of looking at, thinking about, and staging Native American stories. 

A Navajo Nation citizen (Ta’neeszahnii bashishchiin dóó Táchii’nii dashinalí), she’s seen her plays on stages from Alaska to Mexico, including in Carnegie Hall’s collaboration with American Indian Community House and Eagle Project. She has a new co-commissioned play in the works with Long Wharf Theatre and Rattlestick Theater and is developing her play, Nancy, about Nancy Reagan and her intersection with Indian Country in the ‘80s, astrology, and her little-known Native heritage. Yazzie also wrote, directed, and starred in her first feature film, A Winter Love, which premiered in 2022.

She received the 2021 Lanford Wilson and 2020 Steinberg awards and is a 2018 Bush Foundation Leadership Fellow. Yazzie was recognized with a 2017 Sally Ordway Award for Vision and has been a Playwrights’ Center fellow multiple times. 

Priest first appeared at the Moss Arts Center in Indigenous Performance Production's Welcome to Indian Country in 2021. This is Taffa's and Yazzie's first performance at the center.

This performance is supported in part by a gift from Dr. Rosemary Blieszner and Dr. Stephen P. Gerus.