Deborah A. Miranda

Native American writer, poet, and professor of English

Deborah A. Miranda is an American writer, poet, and professor of English at Washington and Lee University. Her father, Alfred Edward Robles Miranda, is of self identified Esselen and Chumash descent (Santa Barbara, Santa Ynez and Monterey, California). Her mother, Madgel Eleanor (Yeoman) Miranda, was of French and Jewish ancestry. Miranda claims descent from what are known as "Mission Indians," Indigenous peoples of many Southern California tribes who were forcibly removed from their land into several Franciscan missions. She is a member of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation, an unrecognized organization that identifies as a tribe.

At a young age, Miranda experienced family trauma. When she was three, her father was sentenced to prison, and her mother moved the family to Washington state. As another example, when she was 7, after her family moved, a friend of her mothers had raped her. Growing up in a new state without her father, Miranda questioned her identity, and used writing as a way to make sense of her family history. When father was released from prison, he and her mother started to get back to their tribal roots. To escape her family trauma, she married her high school teacher and moved in him and his 2 children. The Ohlone Costanoan Esselen people have dealt with identity stripping, since the majority of tribal nations residing in Southern California were forced out. In 2012, Miranda received a Lenfest Sabbatical Grant for her project "The Hidden Stories of Isabel Meadows and Other California Indian Lacunae". In 2015, she won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. Miranda maintains a blog and Twitter account known as BAD NDNS, where she writes about her life, poetry, and essential histories. She is married to Margo Solod and has two children, Miranda and Danny. A lot of her poetry was motivated through her mixed blood ancestry and focused on the natural world, gender, mothering, and the ability to power through living in a violent world.

Miranda's poetry is widely anthologized, and she also writes scholarly articles tackling such issues as racism, colonialism, misogyny, intergenerational trauma, childhood trauma, identity, environmental crises, the political climate, and linguistic barriers. Some examples include:

"Lunatic or Lover, Madman or Shaman: The Role of the Poet in Contemporary Culture(s)." Stealing Light: A Raven Chronicles Anthology. Raven Chronicle Press. 2018. "Tuolumne" in World Literature Today. May 2017. "What's Wrong with a Little Fantasy? Storytelling from the (still) Ivory Tower" in American Indian Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 1&2. "A String of Textbooks: Artifacts of Composition Pedagogy in Indian Boarding Schools." The Journal of Teaching Writing. Vol. 16.2, Fall 2000. "I Don't Speak the Language that has the Sentences: An Interview with Paula Gunn Allen" in Sojourner: The Women's Forum. February 1999, Vol. 24, No. 2. "A Strong Woman Pursuing Her God: Linda Hogan's Power" in Sojourner: The Women's Forum. November 2000, Vol. 26, No. 3.