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.
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 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 will direct 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.
She is a radio producer and co-host of American Indian Airwaves/Coyote Radio on KPFK Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles. Malcolm Margolin of Heyday Books called her "the best damn interviewer ever."
{Carolyn} 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. --- Charles de Lint
To read Carolyn Dunn's poetry is to be transported to a realm almost lost in contemporary westernized America, one where the past is ever-present and the mythic walks hand in hand with the quotidian. Drawing on the traditions of her Native American heritage, Dunn portrays a world where the emotions and experiences of today, though rendered with moving immediacy and potency, are part of a continuum extending back into the mists of time - a perspective that imbues them with a resonance both empowering and transcendent. --- Rand Johnson
This website will allow you to explore her work, keep up with her web log, either by reading it on the site or by receiving posts by email. You can learn about her other community service activities and find out about her new bookstore, Mother Bear's Books. A calendar of her appearances is also available.