Bad Indians at San Francisco Public Library
December 17, 2021 | 2:00 pm
Join the San Francisco Public Library for On the Same Page—a bimonthly city-wide reading group. Each month San Francisco Public Library staff select titles of literary merit, high interest, and readability with the goals of appealing to the community and sparking engagement. The focus is on local, emerging and diverse authors.
This event features an author talk with Deborah A. Miranda, author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, a beautiful and devastating book about the experience of California Indians, as told through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections and poems.
“If we allow the pieces of our culture to lie scattered in the dust of history, trampled on by racism and grief, then yes, we are irreparably damaged. But if we pick up the pieces and use them in new ways that honor their integrity, their colors, textures, stories—then we do those pieces justice, no matter how sharp they are, no matter how much handling them slices our fingers and makes us bleed.”
—Deborah A. Miranda, Bad Indians
Register for the event (available via Zoom) at the San Francisco Public Library website.
Register HereAbout the Speaker
Deborah A. Miranda
Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California. Deborah lives in Eugene, Oregon with her wife, writer Margo Solod, and a variety of rescue dogs. She is Professor of English emerita at Washington and Lee University, where she taught literature of the margins and creative writing as the Thomas H. Broadus, Jr. Endowed Chair.
Her mixed-genre memoir Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir received the 2015 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Association, and was short-listed for the William Saroyan Literary Award. She is also the author of four poetry collections: Indian Cartography, The Zen of La Llorona, Raised by Humans, and Altar for Broken Things. She is the co-editor of Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature and contributing editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through. Photo by Margo Solod.
