Open Book On Location – Episode 9

Elissa Washuta

2020 Author

Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of My Body Is a Book of Rules and Starvation Mode, and her book White Magic is forthcoming from Tin House Books. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. Washuta has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, Artist Trust, 4Culture, and Potlatch Fund. Washuta is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University.

Kristen Millares Young

2020 Author

Kristen Millares Young is the author of Subduction and currently a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards, best novel and best first novel. A prize-winning journalist and essayist, Millares Young served as Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House in Seattle from 2018-2020. Her reviews, essays and investigations appear in the Washington Post, Literary Hub, the Guardian, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “SnowFall,” which won a Pulitzer and a Peabody.

Photo credit: Jenn Furber

Sierra Crane Murdoch

2020 Author

Sierra Crane Murdoch is a journalist and essayist whose work concerns communities in the American West, particularly those tied to natural resource extraction. Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her writing has appeared on This American Life and in Harper’s, VQR, The New Yorker online, Orion, The Atlantic, and High Country News. Crane Murdoch has held fellowships from Middlebury College and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley and is a MacDowell Fellow.

Photo credit: Terray Sylvester