With the publication of her fourth book of poetry, Sáanii Dahataal: The Women Are Singing (1993), Luci Tapahonso joined such writers as Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko as an important female voice in the American Indian literary landscape. The book demonstrates her versatility and maturity as a writer and brings together the elements of landscape, tradition, and humor that were evident in earlier works. In this volume Tapahonso combines poetry and fiction and places herself in the "foreign" landscape of Kansas, so different from the arid New Mexico where she grew up and where the San Juan and Rio Grande rivers are quiet compared to the wide, brown waters of the Kaw River in her new midwestern home.

Tapahonso was born on 8 November 1953 in Shiprock, New Mexico, on the largest Indian reservation in the United States in both area and population, to Eugene Tapahonso...