Biography
Navarre Scott Momaday (1934-2024) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance. A member of the Kiowa tribe, Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma. His father, an artist, and his mother, a writer, eventually moved the family to Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, which served as inspiration for many of Momaday’s works. Influenced by William Faulkner and Yvor Winters, as well as oral storytelling traditions, his work explores identity, self-expression, history, belonging, and our connection to nature. A recipient of the National Medal of Arts, Momaday used rhyme, rhythm, metre, and repetition to give his poems a mythic quality. His last poetry collection was Dream Drawings: Configurations of a Timeless Kind (2022).
