New Books In The American West

Today’s book is: The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, which is the 2022 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award Winner. The Diné Reader showcases the breadth, depth, and diversity of Diné creative artists and their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose, in a wide-ranging anthology. The collected works display a rich variety of and creativity in themes: home and history; contemporary concerns about identity, historical trauma, and loss of language; and economic and environmental inequalities. The Diné Reader developed as a way to demonstrate both the power of Diné literary artistry and the persistence of the Navajo people. The volume opens with a foreword by poet Sherwin Bitsui, who offers insight into the importance of writing to the Navajo people. The editors then introduce the volume by detailing the literary history of the Diné people, establishing the context for the tremendous diversity of the works that follow, which includes free verse, sestinas, limericks, haiku, prose poems, cre