The English Department and First-Year Writing Program will present an evening presentation by Deborah Miranda, the author of this year’s English 110 Common Reading selection, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. The mixed-genre memoir plumbs deeply into Indigenous displacement, imprisonment, genocide, remembrance, resilience and solidarity in a poetically rendered corrective to prevailing narratives of Native erasure.

With dauntless emotional honesty, Miranda challenges the pedagogy of California Missions history, envisions Native life through colonization and reflects movingly on intergenerational legacies of colonial trauma and collective liberation.

Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California. She is a professor of English emerita at Washington and Lee University, where she taught literature of the margins and creative writing as the Thomas H. Broadus Jr. Endowed Chair.

Book signing will be 5-5:30 p.m. The 10th anniversary edition of Bad Indians will be available for purchase.

This event is free and open to the public. No reservations are required.

The event is sponsored by the English Department, Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice, Faculty Affairs and the Vesper Society funds for Indigenous Cultural Knowledge.