Simon J. Ortiz is widely regarded as one of the literary giants of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with more than two dozen volumes of poetry, prose fiction, children's literature, and nonfiction work to his credit and his being anthologized around the world. This edited volume is devoted to the depth and range of Ortiz's contribution to contemporary Native American literature and literary scholarship.
Including interviews with Ortiz, short creative nonfiction essays by Native women writers and scholars, and innovative critical discussions by a dozen scholars of Native literatures, the volume shows his role in the development of cultural studies and Native American literatures on a number of fronts, garnering tribal, regional, national, hemispheric, and global levels of awareness and appreciation. The range of scholarship herein sheds light on the larger historical, cultural, and political factors that have shaped Native writing over the last four decades.
This volume reveals the insights and aesthetics of Ortiz's indigenous lens, which provides invaluable contributions to literary studies that turn to the postcolonial, the ecocritical, the globally indigenous and comparative as indigenous geographies of belonging are found to inform an aesthetics of inclusion and authenticity.
Contributors:
Elizabeth Ammons, Tufts University (Boston)
Elizabeth Archuleta (Yaqui), Arizona State University
Esther Belin, Durango, Colorado
Jeff Berglund, Northern Arizona University (Flagstaff)
Kimberly Blaeser (Chippewa), University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee)
Gregory Cajete (Tewa), University of New Mexico
Sophia Cantave, Boston
David Dunaway, University of New Mexico (Albuquerque)
Roger Dunsmore, University of Montana (retired)
Lawrence Evers, University of Arizona
Gwen Westerman Griffin (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota Oyate), Minnesota State University (Mankato)
Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), Honolulu
Geary Hobson (Cherokee, Arkansas Quapaw), University of Oklahoma
David L. Moore, University of Montana
Debbie Reese (Nambe Pueblo), University of Illinois
Kimberly Roppolo (Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek), University of Oklahoma
Ralph Salisbury, University of Oregon (retired)
Kathryn W. Shanley (Assiniboine), University of Montana
Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Tucson
Sean Kicummah Teuton (Cherokee), University of Wisconsin (Madison)
Laura Tohe (DinA(c)), Arizona State University
Robert Warrior (Osage), University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)

At the Indian artisans show in Santa Clara Pueblo, Cecelia Bluespruce sits with her wares in the middle of a row of booths--a good place to catch buyers. She is a successful Native American artist, a sculptor and potter of renown. But Cecelia is in the middle of something deeper than an art show, for she has become trapped by dreams and shadows of her past.

"Night Sky, Morning Star" is a story of remembrance and reconciliation in one Native American family separated by time and chance. Cecelia's grown son, Jude, now wants to learn about the father he has never known. Political activist Julian Morning Star, imprisoned twenty years for a crime he did not commit, is unaware that his son even exists. Troubled by dreams, lies, and denial of the past, Cecelia is guided toward wholeness by family and friends who have their own pasts to confront.

This compelling novel plunges readers into the hubbub of the Indian arts market and into the grim reality of prison life. Evelina Zuni Lucero introduces us to experiences we may find unfamiliar: diverse Native American traditions, life on a BIA Indian agency compound, the making of an Indian activist. But she also reintroduces us to two things we all live for: the power of story and the power of love.

"Night Sky, Morning Star" is the fiction winner of the 1999 First Book Awards competition of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas.