Date/Time: November 9, 2024 – 2:00pm to 3:00pm
Join us at the library or online Saturday, November 9th at 2:00pm to celebrate Native American Heritage Month with author Cliff Taylor, a Ponca storyteller, essayist, and poet focused on the Native experience.
Cliff Taylor’s book The Memory of Souls isn’t just a memoir about the elders, the old culture, and the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska. It is also about healing, joy, and being Indian. It is the story of him stumbling into his people’s ways and then finding community and home – of him shedding the bindings of trauma and getting his soul back. Part journey of cultural recovery, regeneration and remembrance and part Sundancer’s memoir, The Memory of Souls is both a back pocket talisman for future generations, and an old prayer song sung into the night.
Notes of An Indigenous Futurist, his newest story collection, is an unfiltered, beadwork-and-Bigfoot saturated, ecstatic remembering of a fortysomething Ponca’s life. Along the meandering trails tightly woven by his dream-like stories, Taylor takes readers to intimate, sometimes extraordinary, arenas of being a Ponca. Journey across blurred time zones and places, in which his descendants, his lover, and his ancestors, like the respected Standing Bear, come alive.
Taylor’s other works include the poetry collection The Native Who Never Left, essays and poems published with lastrealindians.com, where he is a regular contributor, and with The Yellow Medicine Review, Jelly Bucket, Oakwood Magazine, and Hipfish Monthly. A Nebraskan through and through, he currently resides on the Oregon Coast with his sweetheart of many years.
“Cliff Taylor has woven something that is equal parts memoir, lucid dream, and road map.” – Logan Garner, Author of Here, In The Floodplain