A MELUS Interview: Luci Tapahonso

Abstract

The middle one of eleven children, Tapahonso was born in Shiprock, New Mexico where her family still lives on a farm three miles from the town up on the north mesa. In speaking of her early years (in the biographical statement in her first book of poems, One More Shiprock Night, published in 1981 by Tejas Art Press) she says: know that I cannot divide myself or separate myself from that place my home, my land, and my people. And that realization is my security and my mainstay in my life away from there. After attending school at the Navajo Methodist Mission in Farmington, thirty miles from Shiprock, she graduated from Shiprock High School in 1971, served in 1974 on the Board of Directors of the Phoenix Indian Center, and took part in a training program for investigative reporting at the National Indian Youth Council. In 1976 she began studying journalism at the University of New Mexico but switched her major to English after studying with Leslie Silko, graduating in 1980. Currently a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, she is pursuing a Doctorate in Modern Literature. Married to Earl Ortiz, an artist whose drawings illustrate her first volume, she is the mother of two daughters, Lori and Misty Dawn. Her second volume of poems, Seasonal Woman, was published in 1982 by Tooth of Time Press with illustrations by the internationally known Native American Artist R. C. Gorman. In his review of that book, (published in Volume 11, Numbers 3 & 4 of The Greenfield Review), Floyce Alexander writes: Luci Tapahonso's Seasonal Woman establishes the presence of a new and potentially important voice among younger American poets. For Tapahonso, he goes on to say, as for her people, the human spirit survives through remembering a 'common history' that rooted in the heart long before the white man's invasion and desecration of the continent. Like so much of the powerful poetry now being written by young Native American writers, Tapahonso's work tells the truth.