Native American/First Nations Woman Writer of the Week
SUSAN POWER
March may have come to an end, but there is still time to celebrate! The next Indigenous writer I would like to give the spotlight to is Susan Power (1961-), a Native American novelist who is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of the Dakotas. She was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised by her mother, Susan Kelly Power (Gathering of Stormclouds Woman, in Dakota) who is also an enrolled member, and her father Carleton Gilmore Power, who was a publishing sales representative. Her parents raised her to be politically and socially aware, and with their help became active in the Civil Rights movement. She was named Miss Indian Chicago when she was seventeen and after that went on to get an A.B. degree in Psychology at Harvard/Radcliffe, and later received her Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School. She worked her way up from a housekeeping job to being the editor of the University of Chicago Law Review, which was the catalyst for motivating her to pursue creative writing. Her mother used to recite stories about their native lineage, and her father read her stories at night; she states that her inspiration come from her mother’s native influence as well as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, and Shakespeare. By the age of twelve she had memorized the entirety of Romeo and Juliet.
Power ultimately decided to end her law career and pursue creative writing fully while she was recovering from an appendectomy. The catalyst for this choice was a Dakota Sioux woman standing in her hospital room wearing a sky blue beaded dress; this vision spirit would later become a main character of her first novel The Grass Dancer, which was published by Putnam in 1994. This novel went on to win the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Novel in 1995. Her short fiction has also been published in Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Voice Literary Supplement, Ploughshares, Story, and The Best American Short Stories 1993.
Power focuses heavily on themes of ancestry, dream images, and intricate storytelling to fully engage her readers. She uses the strengths of these themes to relate her personal experience as a Native American woman while leaving room for the reader to interpret and respond to her writing in their own way without limiting the possibilities.
UWM Special Collection preserves Power’s Sacred Wilderness (Michigan State University Press, 2014) and Roofwalker (Milkweed Editions, 2002).
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- Elizabeth V., Special Collections Undergraduate Writing Intern
