Luci Tapahonso

Navajo Nation Inaugural Poet Laureate
Poems and Stories

Winner of the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association's 1998 Regional Book Award for Adult Nonfiction

  • A poignant collection of stories and poems celebrating the joys and sorrows of everyday life. . . . Deeply entrenched in the author’s Navajo heritage, these stories and poems speak to women of all cultures.

    Library Journal
  • A totally engrossing narrative. Her writing is honest and straightforward, and yet so beautiful, so deep, so moving.

    Books of the Southwest
  • These wise and perceptive ‘observations and experiences,’ as she calls them, cover a broad range of subjects: language and life and death, family and love and respect, and Navajo ways of finding beauty and harmony and even joy in a world that has too much misfortune in it.

    Bloomsbury Review
  • Filled with rich natural images, her writing recites meaningful events that can guide a reader feeling lost in our confusing, hi-tech world. . . . A memorable book!

    Book Talk

A Radiant Curve

Poems and Stories
  • Tapahonso’s newest poetry collection, A Radiant Curve, confirms her place near the top of any list in American literature.

    Studies in American Indian Literatures
  • Tapahonso celebrates the everyday acts, rituals, and stories that draw people together across the years and across the distances of cultural dispersion.

    Library Journal

Sáanii Dahataal/The Women Are Singing

Poems and Stories
  • These stories, simple on the surface, are enormous and resonant. . . . Luci Tapahonso writes the world into balance and harmony, she writes homesickness away.

    Parabola
  • The stories and poems of this book come from a place of long horizons and a huge sky. . . . Luci Tapahonso lovingly uses memory and story to put back the world with a faith in what is gone, but not lost.

    Weber Studies
  • A music that rises from deep roots.

    Beloit Poetry Journal
  • Ms. Tapahonso speaks the observed and spiritual world into existence.

    The New York Times Book Review
  • There is no real distinction between her long-lined, exploratory ‘poems’ and dense, metaphorically rich ‘essays.’ Both capture the voice of a storyteller steeped in traditional ways but fluent as well in contemporary expression….Tapahonso provides us with a true bridge to her culture and its spiritual insights.

    Booklist