Nila northSun was born of Chippewa-Shoshone descent in Schurz, Nevada, in 1951. A graduate of the University of Montana, she lives on the Stillwater Indian Reservation in Fallon, Nevada, where she is director of a teen crisis center. Part of the Native American literary renaissance of the 1970s, she served as coeditor of Scree magazine; published two books of poetry, Diet Pepsi and Nacho Cheese (1977) and Small Bones, Little Eyes (1981); and coauthored a tribal history for the Paiute-Shoshone tribe. Her poems have been anthologized in New Worlds of Literature (Norton) and Reinventing the Enemy's Language (Arizona) as well as several European collections.
After attending the Returning the Gift Native Writers Festival in 1992, she started writing and submitting her work again. This collection, including poems from her early chapbooks as well as later writing, was first announced in 1994. The title poem, she says, is "not only sexually suggestive, but alludes to the idea of a forked tongue liar or a gossip from which many of the other pieces derive."
