Outfoxing Coyote (The Paula Gunn Allen American Indian Poets (The Paula Gunn Allen American Indian Poets Ser. 1) [Paperback]

Carolyn Dunn (Author), Paula Gunn Allen (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1928708080 | ISBN-13: 978-1928708087 | Publication Date: January 31, 2002 | Edition: 1

Poetry by acclaimed Cherokee/Creek/Seminole poet, writer, and editor Carolyn Dunn.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Realizing the mysterious importance of shape shifting, this talented poet takes us into the worlds of Coyotesse, Turquoise Woman, Deer Woman, Warrior Woman, and Eagle Woman. Through this shifting we realize the importance of finding answers to the following: How can we know our people unless we know as they knew? See as they saw? Become as they were? Simply put, we can't. Carolyn's writings give us clues how to do so, how to outfox the trickster in ourselves, how to see with our eyes closed. --MariJo Moore, A Broken Flute: The Indian Experience in Books for Children

In this first collection of her poetry, Carolyn Dunn hits the mark so often, and writes with such confidence of the shadowy world of the spirits, that you find yourself wondering if she's entirely of this world herself. Deer Woman and Coyote wander through the verses, always changing, always bringing change, but the transformations that Dunn chronicles are more often instances of human change and self-understanding. Experiencing them allows us to recognize the patterns that take shape in our own lives. Dunn's language is a perfect blend of the matter-of-fact and the mystic. Her stories are political, sensual, personal, and if not universal, they're certainly not specific to only one gender's or one community's experience. Tears, joy, rage, mystery, and a desire--no, a need--to understand all stride through the pages of Outfoxing Coyote, but the largest presence is heart: the heart of a poet who shares the gift of her stories with resilient tenderness and unflinching strength. Highly recommended. --Charles De Lint, Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Carolyn Dunn's poetry draws on Native American stories and imagery to order the experiences of contemporary life. Dunn's poems are both personal and universal, and she transfigures the everyday experiences of her life through the mystical beings who inhabit her Creek/Cherokee/Seminole heritage. Coyote, the alluring, treacherous trickster, transforms experience, often with unexpected and surprising results. The book's title poem tells us that he's a teller of stories that "don't always have endings." Sometimes he's human, sometimes animal and always godlike, a giver of knowledge and survival. Deer Woman, like, Coyote, is a shape-shifter, but those who see her dancing are bewitched until they waste away and die. In "Deerskin," Deer Woman dances with the sun, learning "the difference between the story of the deer and the fragile skin of the woman, the fear in the eyes of the hunted, the blessing and burden of myth." The most satisfying poetry shows us variations of our own life experiences metamorphosed by the language of the poet. Dunn's poems do that, recreating the passion, humor, and irony of everyday experiences transformed to mythic proportions. --Janice Snapp, Rambles

About the Author

CAROLYN DUNN's work has appeared in the anthologies The Color of Resistance (1994), Reinventing the Enemy's Language (1997), and Through the Eye of the Deer (1999) and Kenneth Lincoln's Sing With the Heart of A Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry. The author of many articles that have appeared in journals in the US, Canada and Germany, she is the co-editor (with Carol Comfort) of Through the Eye of the Deer (1999) and Hozho: Walking in Beauty (with Paula Gunn Allen). Currently a professor at California State Ploytechnic University, Pomona in Ethnic & Women's Studies department, she is a member of the all woman Native drum group the Mankillers, having written songs for the group's cd's All Woman Northern Drum (1997), Comin to Getcha! (1999); and Killing You Softly (2002).

Product Details

• Paperback: 95 pages
• Publisher: That Painted Horse Press; 1 edition (January 31, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1928708080
• ISBN-13: 978-1928708087
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,398,558 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Carolyn Dunn is an American Indian artist of Cherokee, Muskogee Creek, and Seminole descent on her father's side, and is Cajun, French Creole, and Tunica-Biloxi on her mother's. Primarily a poet and a playwright, Carolyn began telling and writing stories at a very young age, being exposed to storytelling traditions from all aspects of her very Southern and very Western background. Her work has been recognized by the Wordcraft Circle of Storytellers and Writers as Book of the Year for poetry (Outfoxing Coyote, 2002) as well as the Year's Best in 1999 for her short story "Salmon Creek Road Kill", Native American Music Awards (for the Mankillers cd Comin to Getcha) and the Humboldt Area Foundation. She has a forthcoming poetry book, Echo Location, in 2009 and her most recent book is Coyote Speaks, native stories for young adult readers, coauthored with Ari Berk (Abrams, 2008).

As an academic, Carolyn's work has primarily focused on landscape in American Indian women's literature (poetry, prose, and drama), and urban American Indian identity formation and southeastern American Indian diasporic literary traditions in California. Currently, she is a James Irvine Foundation Fellow at the Center for American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where she is pursuing a doctorate. She has taught and developed university curriculum in American Indian literature (poetry and fiction), history, and theatre; she has adapted and directed numerous radio theatre plays as well as staged productions of traditional stories, poems and songs with the American Indian Theatre Collective, Chapa De Indian Youth Theatre Company, The Los Angeles Theater Project, and directed a staged reading of Arigon Starr's one woman play, The Red Road for Native Voices at The Autry at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles in 2005.

Carolyn is currently a Lecturer in the American Indian Studies program at California State University, Long Beach, where she teaches history, literature and film.