We’re thrilled to announce that our June Book Club selection is Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, co-edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton and forthcoming from University of Washington Press on June 29, but available to Rumpus Book Club members in just a few weeks!
Just as a basket’s purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, the editors have curated an exciting collection of imaginative, world-making lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island into a well-crafted basket.
Shapes of Native Nonfiction features a dynamic combination of established and emerging Native writers, including Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Terese Marie Mailhot, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Eden Robinson, and Kim TallBear. Their ambitious, creative, and visionary work with genre and form demonstrate the slippery, shape-changing possibilities of Native stories. Considered together, they offer responses to broader questions of materiality, orality, spatiality, and temporality that continue to animate the study and practice of distinct Native literary traditions in North America.
Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Club by May 15 to join us in reading Shapes of Native Nonfiction, culminating in an exclusive online discussion with co-editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton about the book!
