Debra Magpie Earling

Debra Cecille Magpie Earling (born August 3, 1957 Spokane, Washington) is a Native American novelist, and short story writer. She is the author of Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, which was on display at the Missoula Museum of Art in late 2011.
Her work has also appeared in Ploughshares and the Northeast Indian Quarterly.

Life

She is of the Bitterroot Salish (tribe).

She is a graduate of the University of Washington, and holds both an MA in English and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Cornell University.

Earling is currently a faculty member in the English Department at the University of Montana at Missoula.

Awards

• 2007 Guggenheim Fellow
• 2003 American Book Award
• 2006 NEA grant

• "Debra Magpie Earling". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Archived from the original on 2014-11-04. Retrieved 2014-11-04. 
• "Debra Earling". NEA. Retrieved 2014-11-04. 

Works

• Perma Red. BlueHen Books. 2002. ISBN 978-0-399-14899-6. 
• The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. Editions Koch. 2010. 

Anthologies

• William Kittredge, Annick Smith, eds. (1991). The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology. University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0-295-96974-9.  CS1 maint: Uses editors parameter (link)
• Craig Lesley, Katheryn Stavrakis, eds. (1991). Talking Leaves: Contemporary Native American Short Stories. Delta. ISBN 978-0-385-31272-1.  CS1 maint: Uses editors parameter (link)
• Kim Barnes, Mary Clearman Blew, eds. (2001). Circle of Women: Anthology of Western Women Writers. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-3367-6.  CS1 maint: Uses editors parameter (link)
• Sue Thomas, ed. (1994). Wild women: contemporary short stories by women celebrating women. Overlook Press. ISBN 978-0-87951-514-0. 
• Caroline Patterson, ed. (2006). "Bad Ways". Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart. Farcountry Press. p. 196. ISBN 978-1-56037-405-3. Retrieved 2015-01-05. 
• Allen Morris Jones, William Kittredge, eds. (2004). "Real Indians". The Best of Montana's Short Fiction. Globe Pequot. p. 127. ISBN 978-1-59228-269-2. Retrieved 2015-01-05.  CS1 maint: Uses editors parameter (link)
• Alvin M. Josephy, ed. (2007). "What We See". Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes. Random House, Inc. p. 26. ISBN 978-1-4000-7749-6. Retrieved 2015-01-05. 

Reviews

Debra Magpie Earling's debut novel Perma Red is something of a miracle. The University of Montana creative writing professor began writing it in 1984 and, over the years, it has been through at least nine different rewrites, trimmed from an epic-length 800 pages to a compact 288, burned to a crisp in a house fire, and rejected by publishers who loved the writing but thought the original ending too dark and brutal. Through it all, Earling persevered and the novel stands as a testament to her faith and patience.