Acclaimed essayist, poet, theorist, novelist, educator, editor, political activist, and recipient of the 1990 Native American Prize for Literature and the 1990 American Book Award, Paula Gunn Allen is a leading Native American scholar in the literary world today. Her groundbreaking book The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986) is an important feminist analysis of Native American history that focuses on the centrality of women and ritual to indigenous cultures and Native American narrative tradition. Her novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), was one of the first to choose a complex female Indian protagonist and to emphasize not just alienation but also continuity and the potency of relationship in the character's development. Her four chapbooks and four major volumes of poetry established her prominence as a Native American poet. Her public readings, active service on academic panels, dedication to curricular development that supports ethnic and racial...