Lasting Echoes

Using the compelling testimony of more that one hundred Native Americans, American Book Award Winner Joseph Bruchac tell the histories of seven generations of Native American people.From Lakota to Apache to Abenaki, from Geronimo to Sitting Bull to lesser-known voices, Lasting Echoes is the moving story of the American Indian peoples as seen through their own eyes. Starting with the arrival of the Europeans and moving forward to the present, this is the epic tale of men and women who never forgot their connection to the land, or that their own lives and the lives of their people were one. With sensitivity and grace, Abenaki poet and author Bruchac creates an important and compelling portrait of a proud and determined people.

Joseph Bruchac lives with his wife, Carol, in the Adirondack mountainfoothills town of Greenfield Center, New York, in the same house where hismaternal grandparents raised him. Much of his writing has Native Americanthemes and draws on the land he lives on as well as his Abenaki ancestry.Although his American Indian heritage is only one part of an ethnicbackground that includes Slovak and English blood, those Native roots arethe ones by which he as been most nourished. He, his younger sister,Margaret, and his two grown sons, James and Jesse, continue to workextensively in projects involving the preservation of Abenaki culture,language, and traditional Native skills, including performing traditionaland contemporary Abenaki music with the Dawnland Singers.

He holds a B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. in Literature and Creative Writing from Syracuse, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Union Institute of Ohio.His work as an educator includes 8 years of directing a college program for Skidmore College inside a maximum security prison. With his wife, Carol, he is the founder and c-director of the Greenfield Review Literary Center and The Greenfield Review Press. He has edited a number of highly praised anthologies of contemporary poetry and fiction, including Songs from this Earth on Turtle's Back, Breaking Silence (winner of an American Book Award) and Returning the Gift.

His poems, articles and stories have appeared in over 500 publications, from American Poetry Review, Cricket, and Aboriginal Voices to NationalGeographic, Parabola, and Smithsonian Magazine. He has authored more than70 books for adults and children, including The First Strawberries, Keepersof the Earth (co-authored with Michael Cadult), Tell Me a Tale, When theChenoo Howls (co-authored with his son, James), his autobiography Bowman'sStore, and such novels as Dawn Land, The Waters Between, Arrow Over theDoor, and The Heart of a Chief. Forthcoming titles include Squanto's Journey (Harcourt), a picture book, Sacajawea's Story (Harcourt), a historical novel, Crazy Horse's Vision (Lee &Low), a picture book, and Pushing Up the Sky (Dial), a collectin of plays for children.

His honors include a Rockefeller Humanities fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship for Poetry, the Cherokee Nation Prose Award, the Knickerbocker Award, the Hope S. Dean Award for Notable Achievement in Children's Literature and both the 1998 Writer of the Year Award and the 1998 Storyteller of the Year Award from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. In 1999, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the America.

As a professional teller of the traditional tales of the Adirondacks and the Native peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands, Joseph Bruchac has performed widely in Europe and throughout the U.S. from Florida to Hawaii and has been featured at such events as the British Storytelling Festival and the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, TN. He has been astoryteller-in-residence for Native American organizations and schoolsthroughout the continent, including the Institute of Alaska Native Arts andthe Onondaga Nation School. He discusses Native culture and his books anddoes storytelling programs at dozens of elementary and secondary schoolseach year as a visiting author.