October 17, 2007

Frances Washburn (Lakota/Anishinabe) is the author of Elsie’s Business (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), a modern retelling of the Lakota Deer Woman story. Washburn teaches at the University of Arizona at Tucson in the American Indian studies and English departments. She grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota and received her degrees from the University of New Mexico (B.A., M.A., and Ph.D.). In the author’s words, Elsie’s Business is “intriguing, mysterious, and tragic....The events that happen to Elsie, happen to young Indian women everywhere.... I am asking readers to remember all those whose deaths have been forgotten.”