The strength of Diane Glancy's writing is summarized in her award-winning autobiographical work Claiming Breath (1992): "The ordinary life I write about from the harshness, the fullness of this land." Her work is a refreshingly honest depiction of contemporary American Indian life with common themes that are easily accessible to Indian and non-Indian readers alike: mixed-bloodedness, heritage, colonialism, middle age, feminism, divorce, death, power, and survival.

Helen Diane Hall was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on 18 March 1941 to Edith Wood Hall, of English and German descent, and Lewis Hall, a Cherokee. She attended school in Kansas City, Indianapolis, and Saint Louis, where she graduated in 1959 from Normandie High School. She received her B.A. from the University of Missouri in 1964. That same year she married Dwane Glancy -- "the wrong man," she says in Claiming Breath -- with whom she had two children: David, born on 10 December 1964; and Jennifer...