Joseph Bruchac

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male

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http://www.josephbruchac.com/

About this author

Joseph Bruchac lives with his wife, Carol, in the Adirondack mountain foothills town of Greenfield Center, New York, in the same house where his maternal grandparents raised him. Much of his writing draws on that land and his Abenaki ancestry. Although his American Indian heritage is only one part of an ethnic background that includes Slovak and English blood, those Native roots are the ones by which he has been most nourished. He, his younger sister Margaret, and his two grown sons, James and Jesse, continue to work extensively in projects involving the preservation of Abenaki culture, language and traditional Native skills, including performing traditional and contemporary Abenaki music with the Dawnland Singers.

He holds a B.A. from Corn...more Joseph Bruchac lives with his wife, Carol, in the Adirondack mountain foothills town of Greenfield Center, New York, in the same house where his maternal grandparents raised him. Much of his writing draws on that land and his Abenaki ancestry. Although his American Indian heritage is only one part of an ethnic background that includes Slovak and English blood, those Native roots are the ones by which he has been most nourished. He, his younger sister Margaret, and his two grown sons, James and Jesse, continue to work extensively in projects involving the preservation of Abenaki culture, language and traditional Native skills, including performing traditional and contemporary Abenaki music with the Dawnland Singers.

He holds a B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. in Literature and Creative Writing from Syracuse and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Union Institute of Ohio. His work as a educator includes eight years of directing a college program for Skidmore College inside a maximum security prison. With his wife, Carol, he is the founder and Co-Director of the Greenfield Review Literary Center and The Greenfield Review Press. He has edited a number of highly praised anthologies of contemporary poetry and fiction, including Songs from this Earth on Turtle's Back, Breaking Silence (winner of an American Book Award) and Returning the Gift. His poems, articles and stories have appeared in over 500 publications, from American Poetry Review, Cricket and Aboriginal Voices to National Geographic, Parabola and Smithsonian Magazine. He has authored more than 70 books for adults and children, including The First Strawberries, Keepers of the Earth (co-authored with Michael Caduto), Tell Me a Tale, When the Chenoo Howls (co-authored with his son, James), his autobiography Bowman's Store and such novels as Dawn Land, The Waters Between, Arrow Over the Door and The Heart of a Chief. Forthcoming titles include Squanto's Journey (Harcourt), a picture book, Sacajawea (Harcourt), an historical novel, Crazy Horse's Vision (Lee & Low), a picture book, and Pushing Up The Sky (Dial), a collection of plays for children. His honors include a Rockefeller Humanities fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship for Poetry, the Cherokee Nation Prose Award, the Knickerbocker Award, the Hope S. Dean Award for Notable Achievement in Children's Literature and both the 1998 Writer of the Year Award and the 1998 Storyteller of the Year Award from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. In 1999, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas.

As a professional teller of the traditional tales of the Adirondacks and the Native peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands, Joe Bruchac has performed widely in Europe and throughout the United States from Florida to Hawaii and has been featured at such events as the British Storytelling Festival and the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tennessee. He has been a storyteller-in-residence for Native American organizations and schools throughout the continent, including the Institute of Alaska Native Arts and the Onondaga Nation School. He discusses Native culture and his books and does storytelling programs at dozens of elementary and secondary schools each year as a visiting author.
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Books by Joseph Bruchac

Average rating: 3.70 · 5,471 ratings · 1,455 reviews · 144 distinct works

	Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two 3.79 avg rating — 1,471 ratings — published 2005 — 14 editions	My rating:
	Skeleton Man 3.71 avg rating — 747 ratings — published 2001 — 12 editions	My rating:
	Wabi: A Hero's Tale 3.87 avg rating — 126 ratings — published 2006 — 7 editions	My rating:
	Dragon Castle 3.58 avg rating — 122 ratings — published 2011 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Hidden Roots 3.64 avg rating — 113 ratings — published 2004 — 4 editions	My rating:
	The Dark Pond by Joseph Bruchac, Sally Wern Comport (Illustrations) 3.41 avg rating — 132 ratings — published 2004 — 9 editions	My rating:
	The First Strawberries by Joseph Bruchac, Anna Vojtech (Illustrator) 3.80 avg rating — 103 ratings — published 1993 — 5 editions	My rating:
	March Toward the Thunder 3.76 avg rating — 98 ratings — published 2008 — 4 editions	My rating:
	Wolf Mark 3.54 avg rating — 97 ratings — published 2011	My rating:
	Sacajawea 3.23 avg rating — 117 ratings — published 2000 — 12 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by Joseph Bruchac

“The best teachers have showed me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly--we only think it does. The motion of drawing back a bow and sending an arrow straight into a target takes only a split second, but it is a skill many years in the making. So it is with a life, anyone's life. I may list things that might be described as my accomplishments in these few pages, but they are only shadows of the larger truth, fragments separated from the whole cycle of becoming. And if I can tell an old-time story now about a man who is walking about, waudjoset ndatlokugan, a forest lodge man, alesakamigwi udlagwedewugan, it is because I spent many years walking about myself, listening to voices that came not just from the people but from animals and trees and stones.”
― Joseph Bruchac

tags: journey , path , patience , personal-mythmaking , story , time , wandering , wisdom

29 people liked it

“Strong words outlast the paper they are written upon. ”
― Joseph Bruchac, Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two

tags: words , writing

18 people liked it

“If it wasn't for good," my mother says, "we human beings would have been wiped out a long time ago. Either the monsters would have gotten us or we would have killed each other off with greed and jealousy and anger. So we have to believe in good. We have to look for the good in ourselves.”
― Joseph Bruchac, The Return of Skeleton Man

5 people liked it

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