The 2013 Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya Lecture on the Literature of the Southwest
N. Scott Momaday
N. Scott Momaday is one of the most distinguished writers of our time. His first novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, an event that brought new visibility to American Indian literature and literature of the Southwest, a landscape that has inflected his fiction, poetry, and paintings for decades.
About the Author
Born in Oklahoma of Kiowa ancestry, he lived throughout the Southwest as a child as his parents taught at Indian schools on Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo lands. He earned a B.A. from the University of New Mexico in 1958 and then taught for a year at the Jicarilla Apache Reservation before moving to Stanford University, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1963.
His writing celebrates the power of language and the richness of oral tradition in works that invoke historical memory and often exceed the boundaries of genre. As Momaday explains: "Language fascinates me. Words are endlessly mysterious to me. And I think by and large that’s good. A writers should have that sense of wonder in the presence of words."
He has published more than 15 volumes of fiction, poetry, and drama, including The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), The Names (1976), The Ancient Child (1989), In the Presence of the Sun (1992), The Man Made of Words (1997), andAgain the Far Morning: New and Selected Poems (2011). An accomplished painter in watercolor, he often illustrates his own texts.
He has taught at the University of Arizona, Stanford University, the University of CaliforniaBerkeley, and the University of California-Santa Barbara, and has been an invited speaker at dozens of universities and colleges across the globe, including the University of Moscow. In 1992 he received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, and in 2007 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. His honors also include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Academy of American Poets prize, and the Premio Letterario Internationale "Mondello," Italy’s highest literary award. He was a founding Trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian, served as Poet Laureate of the Oklahoma Centennial in 2007, and is a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society.
A Special Thank You
Made possible through a generous gift from New Mexico writer Rudolfo Anaya, the annual Anaya Lecture brings together students, faculty, and community members to address the rich traditions and new directions of Southwest literature.
