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DRAGONFLY WEATHER

DRAGONFLY WEATHER

$20.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9883166-5-2

Pub Date: Sept. 2013

Pages: 96


By Lois Red Elk


With the launch of her new book, Dragonfly Weather, Lois Red Elk proves herself a consummate storyteller. With lyrical words and magical images, she draws the reader into a primeval, watery world of warm swamps, spiraling whirl winds and moist fog to experience her journey in time and space. Her dreams, ears and eyes become attuned to the ancient call of dragonflies, who exhorted her to be “swift in worth,” to “find value” in this new dragonfly season—to “Dance in dragonfly style, dodge dangers thrown / dare a step with lightening strike.” I am grateful to Lois that she has shared these sacred clan stories with us. We’la’lin.

—Alice M. Azure


    Between gathering mint tea along Tule Creek, composing answers for the question, Are you a writer of the West? and skinning deer with the instructions of matriarchs singing in her ear, Lois Red Elk keeps to the tasks which enable Wiconi—the good way of life: keep busy, be thankful, pray. Keep your eyes and ears tuned for lessons from Tusweca—dragonfly—and keep these poems close by because you’ll find yourself returning to them again and again for sustenance, guidance and grace.

    —Tiffany Midge, author of The Woman Who Married a Bear (Salt Publishing) and Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed (Greenfield Review Press)


    Lois Red Elk is an enrolled member of the Ft. Peck Sioux in Montana, with roots from the Isanti on her mother’s side, and the Hunkpapa and Ihanktonwa from her father, who is descended from the Sitting Bull family. Raised in her traditional culture, she is a quill and bead worker, a traditional dancer and an advocate for cultural preservation and practice.


    During her earlier years, living in Los Angeles, she was a T.V. talk show host at KCOP-TV, an FM radio host at Pasadena City College, and a technical advisor for many Hollywood film productions. She has been a member of Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists for forty years while working for all the major networks and Hollywood studios in film and television. She enjoys writing poetry, prose and children’s stories and has been published in many Native American anthologies and poetry magazines. As a freelance writer she worked for her tribe’s Native newspaper and authored a weekly column titled “Raised Dakota.”


    Presently she is on the adjunct faculty at Ft. Peck Community College, Montana, teaching cultural arts courses she developed, including Traditional Plants, Domestic Arts, Animals Significant to Dakota Culture, and Porcupine Quill Work. Her first book, Our Blood Remembers, was published in 2011 by Many Voices Press, Kalispell, Montana, and won the Best Non-Fiction award from Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers.

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