This zine project explores Rez dogs and their importance in Native communities. The project centers on my dog, Sandy, adopted from Coconino Humane Society, and Rez dogs I fostered through Tuba City Humane Society, including abandoned homeless puppies from various locations in Tuba City, Arizona, located on the Navajo Reservation

THE DINÉ ARTISANS & AUTHORS CAPACITY BUILDING INSTITUTE ANTHOLOGY
Edited by Shaina Nez and Amber McCrary

We’re honored to introduce a powerful new poetry collection that centers Diné voices and experiences: THE DINÉ ARTISANS & AUTHORS CAPACITY BUILDING INSTITUTE ANTHOLOGY.

Co-edited by Shaina Nez and Amber McCrary, this anthology emerged from deep reflection, community collaboration, and a public call for stories about home. What began as a fellowship writing program grew into a vibrant space for exploring identity, memory, and place—offering poetry that’s as resonant as it is rooted.

Each piece in this collection reflects the beauty, resilience, and brilliance of what home means to the Diné community. Through personal narratives and shared truths, the anthology invites readers into a conversation that honors both tradition and transformation.

For this particular item, we are doing sliding scale pricing. All proceeds go to next print run.

The Languages of our Love: An Indigenous Love and Sex Anthology is a collection that emerges from the voices of Indigenous folks who gathered during an Abalone Mountain Circle Writing Workshop. This collection is a love letter to the Native person hoping to find some answers, advice or stories about Indigenous folks talking about what love and sex is.

Within these pages, you'll discover a mosaic of poems, fiction, and non-fiction pieces contributed from across Native communities, each illuminating what Indigenous love and sex signifies. These narratives encapsulate our experiences, musings, dreams, and anxieties. It's a reclamation, a recognition that we stand together, not as an unending tragedy but as a testament to enduring love throughout Indigenous history. The Languages of our Love represents a reckoning—a celebration of love as it has thrived among Indigenous peoples for centuries and as it continues to flourish into the future.

We are excited to announce our new release date for The Languages of our Love will be July 29th, 2024 AND we finally have a book cover! Thank you to Denise Dominguez and Brandon Villanueva! 

About My Body is an Ill-fitting Costume:

Rachael’s elegant, devastating poetry confronts, head-on, many forms of trauma, including ancestral trauma, child abuse, racism, (in)justice, ongoing colonization, and sexual assault, through vivid, visceral depictions of the body, personhood, motherhood, and the natural and animal worlds. Trauma, dissociation, and fracturing of the self shapes her intimate photography. The photos speak in conversation with the poems, rendering post-traumatic stress, chronic illnesses, and sensual, harsh realities through stark colors and contrast. Layered metaphors of fire, bone, time, pain, metal, water, and (dis)embodiment sustain the arc throughout the book, such as “I beat myself against a stone to strike a spark, but his hands crumbled into fists, grappled, flung me to the linoleum floor. I was mute coal giving off residual heat.” Rachael’s poetry resonates at the soul-level, and delves into distortions of time, where the pasts are always present. 

Bio:

Rachael Johnson is an indigenous, androgynous-gender-fluid, disabled Diné writer/poet from the Navajo Nation. She belongs to Táchii’nii, the Red Running into the Water people, and is born for Kinyaa’áanii, the Towering House clan. Her prose and poetry have been published in The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, Anti-Heroin Chic, Wordgathering, Writers Resist, Poetry Northwest, and Prairie Schooner. Her essay, “Nowhere Place,” won Prairie Schooner's 2017 Summer Creative Nonfiction Contest, a Glenna Luschei Award, and was recognized as a 2018 Notable Essay by Best American Essays. The Diné Reader: an Anthology of Navajo Literature, in which her poems were published, received a 2022 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. She is a kajukenbo mixed martial arts student. She is currently writing a memoir and a novel.

Landscape and perspective flood Boderra Joe’s Desert Teeth, a collection of poetry that unfolds the wakening shift of scarred violence affecting native people and land for centuries, where alcohol and uranium, two of many elements, continue to take the lives of our relatives. Each poem lingers and holds the face of the reader through deep explorations of grief, family, identity, and love. These poems walk out on their own with the memories and images that flicker by, like a thought too frightened to talk. The vulnerability and rawness in each poem expands the perspective, longing for closure, acceptance, and understanding. Each poem lives in language and landscape, all while the haunting violence interferes. Beauty has its way of revealing itself.

Boderra Joe is a Diné poet, journalist, and photographer from Bááhazł'ah (Twin Lakes), New Mexico, on the Navajo Nation. She is Bit’ahnii (Folded Arms Clan), born for Tabááha (Water’s Edge Clan). She holds an MFA and BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the recipient of the Willapa Bay AiR Fellowship, the Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po) Fellowship, and the Bosque Redondo Memorial Artists-In-Their Residence Fellowship.