Diane Glancy

Proficient in numerous genres—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting—Diane Glancy often creates work that reflects her Native American heritage. Part Cherokee, and of English and German descent, Glancy was born in Kansas City, Missouri. She has served as artist-in-residence for the Oklahoma State Arts Council (traveling around the state to teach poetry to Native American students) and has taught Native American literature and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. “Writing is a conversation,” she states on her Macalester webpage.

Reviewers have noted her ability to combine genres, to portray both Native American and non-Native characters, and to depict Native American beliefs and Christianity in her writing. Adept at writing free verse as well as prose poems, she often portrays the intersections of new and old worlds, reporting on history, religion, and the loss of Native traditions. Glancy has explored Native American history in depth in her novels Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears (1996) and Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea (2003).

Glancy’s collection of poems, Primer of the Obsolete, won the 2003 Juniper Prize for Poetry. She has also received the Five Civilized Tribes Playwriting Laureate Prize; the Oklahoma Book Award; the Cherokee Medal of Honor, Cherokee Honor Society, Tahlequah, Oklahoma; the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry; grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; and a Sundance Screenwriting Fellowship.