Contact: Bruce Conley, Associate Director of College Relations
Phone: (605) 274-5526
Fax: (605) 274-4903
www.augie.edu

September 12, 2005

Library Associates Present Author Susan Power

SIOUX FALLS – The Augustana Library Associates present author Susan Power at 7:30 p.m. October 13 in Kresge Recital Hall.

Power will read from her writings, discuss her adventures as an author, and share the impact that her cultural background as an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe has made on her work.

Tickets will be available at the door. General admission is $5.50, Library Associates members $3.50, children and Augustana students are free. For information call Mikkelsen Library at 274-4921.

Power’s best-selling first novel, “Grass Dancer,” was published in 1994 to much critical acclaim. Celebrating the theme of ancestry, the book is a tale of a North Dakota Sioux tribe using their personal experiences and values to shape the larger issues of how they relate to each other. Using different story lines, Power explains that life does not end in the human world, but rather spirits remain to interact through memories, stories, and dreams. While “Grass Dancer” considers the question of what effect ancestry has and continues to have within a Native American community, the question is equally valid for all cultures.

Power’s most recent book, “Roofwalker” (2004), is a mixture of stories and histories, fiction and creative nonfiction about contemporary Native Americans. The stories are of characters who become larger than life as Power describes them. They are struggling with issues – love, marriage, education – complicated by their Native American heritage and their lives in twenty-first century America. In addition, the book reflects the special challenges for those of mixed heritage in coming to grips with one’s history. Power is especially sensitive to this issue being the great-great granddaughter of the Sioux chieftain, Two Bears, on her mother’s side and descended from the Civil War governor of New Hampshire on her father’s side.

In addition to her novels, Power has had short fiction published in a wide array of literary journals and anthologies including Atlantic Monthly, The Best American Short Stories 1993, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and others. She has been the recipient of both a James Michener Fellowship and a Bunting Institute Fellowship at Radcliffe College.

Power was the first Sioux woman to graduate from Harvard University and the first to enter Harvard Law School, where she graduated summa cum laude. She teaches at Hamlin University in St. Paul.