Story Catcher Writing Retreat, Workshop and Festival set for June 6-9

General Registration is $350 which includes one-year membership to the Mari Sandoz Society. Registration for Mari Sandoz Society members and students 18 years an older is $300. Details are at: https://outsideyourself.wordpress.com/. Six Young Lance Fellowships are available for successful emerging and indigenous writers.

The faculty for the workshop will be Beth Piatote, Jake Skeets, Anna Lee Walters, and Gerry Robinson.

Piatote (pronounced pie-a-tote) is the author of The Beadworkers: Stories, winner of the 2020 Electa Quinney Award for Published Stories. Her full-length play, Antikoni, was selected for the 2020 Festival of New Plays by Native Voices and has been supported by readings with New York Classical Theatre and the Indigenous Writers Collaborative at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Her short stories and poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Piatote, who is Nez Perce, is one of the co-creators and current Chair of the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization at the University of California-Berkeley, where she is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and English and directs the Arts Research Center.

Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Whiting Award. He has an M.F.A. in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. His honors include a 2020-2021 Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship and the 2023-2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. Skeets is a winner of the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest. He has edited an online publication called Cloudthroat: A Magazine of Queer Indigenous Endeavor, with a poetry salon and reading series called Pollentongue. Skeets, who is Diné, is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma.

Walters is an Instructor in the Humanities Division at Diné College where she has experience as an independent consultant on American Indian issues, and as a publisher of educational and trade publications with Navajo Community College Press. Walters, who is Pawnee and Otoe-Missouria, was born in Pawnee, Oklahoma. She is the author of nine books and has widely published her prose and poetry in journals, anthologies, and textbooks. Her short story collection, The Sun Is Not Merciful, won the Before Columbus Foundation 1985 American Book Award and the Virginia McCormick Scully Award.

Robinson, raised at the heart of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, is a published historical writer and member of Western Writers of America. His debut novel, The Cheyenne Story: An Interpretation of Courage, the first installment of a three-volume series, was published in 2019. He was the recipient of the 2019 Western Heritage Award and the 2019 Wyoming State Historical Society Award for Fiction.