Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, who calls the Crow Creek reservation home, loves and understands her people and their heritage. She beautifully fuses their story with the Northern Plains setting, and in the process places in stark relief how the destruction of the Missouri River basin has affected the people who live there. A member of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe, Cook-Lynn was born in Fort Thompson, South Dakota, and raised on the reservation. She is Professor Emerita of English and Native American Studies at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington. She was one of the founding editors of Wicazo Sa Review: A Journal of Native American Studies (Red Pencil Review). She is also a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and the Authors Guild. Since her retirement, Elizabeth has served as a writer-in-residence at universities around the country. For her own writing, she believes that “Writing is an essential act of survival for contemporary American Indians.” Her writing and teaching centers on the “cultural, historical, and political survival of Indian Nations.” She also says, “The final responsibility of a writer like me … is to commit something to paper in the modern world which supports this inexhaustible legacy left by our ancestors.”