Celebrating Native American Literary Art

PEN/Faulkner HONORS two greats: N. SCOTT MOMADAY and DEBRA MAGPIE EARLING
BY WILLEE LEWIS EXECUTIVE V P PEN/FAULKNER FOUNDATION

One made his mark in 1969 by winning the Pultizer prize for House Made of Dawn, the other has captivated readers with her first novel, Perma Red. Both deserve their accolades as leading Native American authors.

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation was proud to collaborate with the American Indian Museum Dec. 8th and 9th in order honor two outstanding and award-winning Native American novelists: fiction writers N. Scott Momaday and Debra Magpie Earling. The main event included a dinner for 160 guests in the museum's spacious Potomac Atrium. The next day included a reading in the Rasmuson Theatre attended by an audience of 150 book lovers. The event was made possible with the support of Perini Corporation. Highlighting the foundation's continuing outreach to public schools through its Writers in Schools program, the two authors met at the museum with 30 students from D.C.'s Cardozo High School for a reading, Q and A and book signings.

N. Scott Momaday and Debra Magpie Earling

N. SCOTT MOMADAY
Poet, novelist, playwright, storyteller and artist

N. Scott Momaday

In 1969, Momaday, a husky man with a deep and rich rolling baritone, won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, House Made Of Dawn. That was only an early stage in a triumphal career that has opened the door for other Indian fiction writers. Critics also credit Momaday with enrichening American literature through his distinctive voice and an artistic vision that evokes his experiences from childhood on several reservations in the southwest. Currently, he is senior scholar at the School of American Research in Sante Fe, New Mexico. Momaday bears the imprint of parents who both were teachers. His mother was a writer, so he had the beginning of a relationship with language.

Meanwhile, his father was both a story teller and a painter, pointing Momaday in that direction before becoming a writer. Photography also captured his interest– causing a knee injury after a fall during a recent trip to western Siberia while photographing a 19th Century cabin that had caught his eye. He still relies on a wheelchair while he recuperates. He is a Kiowa and a member if the renowned Kiowa Gourd Dance Society. Aside from his Pultizer Prize winning first novel he is the author of Circle of Wonder, In a Bear's House, The Man Made of Words, and In The Presense of the Sun, among other titles. Momaday is also a founding Trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian.