Tanaya Winder

Tanaya Winder is a performance poet, writer, motivational speaker and educator. With fellow indigenous writer Casandra Lopez, she founded As/Us, an online literary magazine to "showcase the creative literary expressions and scholarly work of both emerging and established women writers from around the world." With Lakota rap artist Frank Waln and other collaborators, she runs Dream Warriors Management, an organization to promote indigenous artists and support young Native students. In 2015, Winder published her first book of poetry, Words Like Love.

Winder grew up on the Southern Ute Indian Reservation in Ignacio, Colorado, and is of Southern Ute, Duckwater Shoshone, and Pyramid Lake Paiute heritage. She received her B.A. from Stanford University and her MFA in creative writing/poetry from The University of New Mexico. As a teacher, Winder has worked at Stanford and the University of Colorado Boulder's Upward Bound program. In 2010, she won the Orlando Poetry Prize for her poem "The Impermanence of Human Sculptures." In 2013 she appeared on TEDxABQ with a talk called "Igniting Healing." In 2015, Winder co-curated "Sing Our River Red," a traveling exhibit of single earrings to raise awareness of Canada's epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women. The following year, she was named one of the "Native American 40 (Leaders) under 40" by the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development.

Published books