Ralph Salisbury

Rockefeller Bellagio Award winner Ralph Salisbury's novel, Bitten Dust, is scheduled for publication in 2012. His three books of short fiction and ten books of poems evoke his Cherokee-Shawnee-Irish-English-American heritage. He has presented his work on stage, on radio, and on TV, in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and India. His poem "In the Children's Museum in Nashville" was published in the New Yorker in 1960, and has attracted attention as a precursor to the contemporary Native American literary movement. In selecting his 2000 book Rainbows of Stone as an Oregon Book Award finalist in poetry, Maxine Kumin wrote: "Nature in Ralph Salisbury's conception is a Presence to be addressed... His book deserves a broad audience." His most recent books are Blind Pumper at the Well (Salt Press, Cambridge, UK), The Indian Who Bombed Berlin (short fiction, Michigan State University Press), and Light from a Bullet Hole: Poems New and Selected, (Silverfish Review Press, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize).

Born of a Cherokee Shawnee story-teller, singer father and a story-telling Irish American mother, he gerw up hunting and trapping for meat and pelts, and working on his family's farm, which had no electricity or running water. Through World War II Air Force service, he earned six years of university education, and has worked at writing, editing, translating, and teaching writing and literature, from 1950 to the present.

Though he has lived and worked among the intelligentsia of many nations, his writing comes from being a questing, mixed-race, working-class individual in a violent world, and he says that his work is offered to the spring of human goodness, which unites all people in the eternal struggle against evil, a struggle to prevail against global extinction. You can find Ralph online at www.ralphsalisbury.com.

A Ceremony for Trying to Accept Death

A Killer Seeking Forgiveness

Old German Woman