The playwright and co-editor, JOY HARJO, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and left in 1967 to attend high school at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, which was a Bureau of Indian Affairs school mostly for high school students. She graduated from the University of New Mexico in 1976 with a BA in creative writing. Harjo has published eight award-winning books of poetry. Her most recent collection of poetry is the recently released Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, which was on the short list for the Griffin International Prize and was named the American Library Association’s Notable Book of the Year. Her writing awards include the prestigious Ruth Lily Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation for lifetime achievement; the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, also for lifetime achievement; a Guggenheim Fellowship; and the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, among others. Her memoir Crazy Brave won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction and the American Book Award. She has published two award-winning children’s books, The Good Luck Cat and For a Girl Becoming.
Harjo has been performing music with her poetry since the early 1990s, when she founded the reggae-tribal-jazz-rock band Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice. Her first album was a spoken word CD, a spoken word classic Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century. This CD featured her saxophone playing and was called “the best dub poetry album of North America.” In 1998 she went solo and produced Native Joy for Real. On this album she began singing. Poet dynamo Bob Holman says of this album, “This is the work of a poet at the top of her powers, whether the driving force is voice spoken (crazy beats of ‘The Last World of Fire & Trash,’ poetry of ‘Hold Up’), voice sung (the incredibly moving ‘Grace’), or saxophone (moving from the Native unisons to a Hip-Hop beat in ‘Reality Show’).” Harjo’s next album began her work with producer and rock guitarist Larry Mitchell. Winding through the Milky Way won many awards, including a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year. Her most recent release, also produced by Mitchell, is Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears, which has won the attention of such critics as Paul Winter, who has said of her music, “Joy Harjo is a poet of music as she is a poet of words.” Harjo was featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour, and a Bill Moyers series on poetry Harjo’s “one-woman” show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, which premiered at the Wells Fargo Theater in Los Angeles in 2009. Harjo is at work on a musical, commissioned by the Public Theater, We Were There When Jazz Was Invented, a show that will rewrite the origin story of blues and jazz to include Southeastern Native peoples’ music. She holds the John C. Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
ROLLAND (ROLLY) MEINHOLTZ has been a theater artist and educator for more than three decades. He holds theater degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Washington. Active as an actor, director, and playwright, he was the drama instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1964–1970. Working with students there, he created plays and theater events that arose directly out of the history and culture of Native Americans. They performed plays and toured nationally. Meinholtz was the artistic director of both the First and Second Festivals of Indian Performing Arts, sponsored by the Interior Department and presented in Washington, DC, 1965 and 1966. In 1970, Meinholtz joined the faculty of the theater department at the University of Montana. He was head of the directing program until 1992. Students of his have since formed the core of theater artists creating Native American theater today. These include poet Joy Harjo, playwright Bill Yellow Robe, actress Jane Lind, children’s theater entrepreneur James Caron, educator and movement pioneer Charlie Oates, performance artist and monologist Moira O’Keefe, choreographer and actress Mary Kate Harris, and Arnie Fishbaugh, beloved and stunningly productive director of the Montana Council. Now retired, Meinholtz resides in Missoula with his wife Peggy, who is an actress and puppeteer.
MARY KATHRYN NAGLE is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She currently serves as executive director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program. She is also a partner at Pipestem Law, PC, where she works to protect tribal sovereignty and the inherent right of Indian Nations to protect their women and children from domestic violence and sexual assault. Nagle has authored numerous briefs in federal appellate courts, including the United States Supreme Court. Nagle studied theater and social justice at Georgetown University as an undergraduate student, and received her JD from Tulane University Law School, where she graduated summa cum laude and received the John Minor Wisdom Award. She is a frequent speaker at law schools and symposia across the country. Her articles have been published in law review journals including the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, Yale Law Journal (online forum), Tulsa Law Review, and Tulane Law Review, among others.
Nagle is an alum of the 2012 Public Theater Emerging Writers Group, where she developed her play Manahatta in Public Studio (May 2014). Productions include Miss Lead (Amerinda, 59E59, January 2014) and Fairly Traceable (Native Voices at the Autry, March 2017). Recent productions include Arena Stage’s world premiere of Sovereignty, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s world premiere of Manahatta. In 2019, the Rose Theater (Omaha, Nebraska) will produce her new play Return to Niobrara.
Nagle has received commissions from Arena Stage (Sovereignty), the Rose Theater (Return to Niobrara), Portland Center Stage (Mnisose), Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and Yale Repertory Theatre.
The contributing co-editor, PRISCILLA PAGE, is a writer and dramaturg as well as a member of the dramaturgy faculty in the Department of Theater at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, where she also serves as the director for the Multicultural Theater Certificate. Her research centers on Latina/o/x theater and contemporary Native American performance, and she is currently writing about Latina/o/x theater history in Chicago. She is a member of the Latinx Theater Commons, the Network of Ensemble Theaters, and Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (LMDA). She holds a BA in theater from California State University–East Bay, the state school where she grew up; an MFA in dramaturgy from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst; as well as a PhD in English, American Studies concentration, also from UMass–Amherst. Page served as the program curator for New WORLD Theater, a professional, nonprofit multicultural theater in residence at UMass Amherst, for five years.
Page’s producing and dramaturgy credits include Collidescope 2.0: Adventures in Pre and Post Racial America, co-written and co-directed by Talvin Wilks and Ping Chong; My Bronx, written and performed by Terry Jenoure; sash & trim, written and performed by Djola Branner and directed by Laurie Carlos; Crossing the Waters, Changing the Air, written and directed by Ingrid Askew; and Lydia on the Top Floor, also written and performed by Terry Jenoure, and directed by Linda McInerney; and Pelaje by Migdalia Cruz, presented at Ateneo Puertorriqueño in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her essay “My World Made Real” is published in Cruz’s anthology El Grito Del Bronx (No PassPort Press, 2010).
RANDY REINHOLZ, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and lived in several small towns throughout the US Midwest, in Missouri, North Dakota, and Texas. He graduated from high school in Camdenton, Missouri, and pursued a higher education afterward. He received his BA in communication from William Jewell College in 1984 and MFA in acting from Cornell University in 1988. He is the producing artistic director of Native Voices at the Autry, the nation’s only Equity theater company dedicated exclusively to the development and production of new plays by Native American, First Nations, and Alaska Native playwrights, co-founded with producing executive director Jean Bruce Scott in 1993. They were honored for this work by Playwrights’ Arena with the Lee Melville Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Los Angeles Theatre Community in 2015. Off the Rails, his bawdy and irreverent adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, was developed by Native Voices at the Autry; it had its first production in Los Angeles in February 2015 and its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with Bill Rauch directing in July 2017. Reinholz wrote “Up from Violence and Empire” for American Theatre’s “20 Years on Wilson’s ‘Ground’: Voices Considering the Impact and the Lasting Legacy of August Wilson’s Seminal 1995 Speech,” and was honored as a Legacy Leader of Color for TCG’s “The Ground at 20” video project. He has received a McKnight Fellowship and a MAP Grant. He has produced more than thirty scripts by Native American playwrights and directed over sixty plays in the United States, Australia, Mexico, and Canada, including The Rez Sisters; Urban Tattoo; Jump Kiss; Now Look What You Made Me Do; The Waiting Room; How I Learned to Drive; Madame Mao; Blood at the Root; Anonymous; Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light; The Red Road; and many productions of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Ibsen plays. He is a tenured professor at San Diego State University, where he served as head of acting from 1997–2007, director of the School of Theatre, Television, and Film from 2007–2012, and director of community engagement and innovation for the College of Professional Studies and Fine Arts at SDSU from 2012–2015.