1. Rebecca Roanhorse was born on 23 September 1971 and is an American science fiction and fantasy writer from New Mexico.
14 Facts About Rebecca Roanhorse
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Rebecca Roanhorse has written short stories and science fiction novels featuring Navajo characters.
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Rebecca Roanhorse's work has received Hugo and Nebula awards, among others.
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Rebecca Roanhorse was adopted as a child by white parents, and raised in northern Texas.
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Rebecca Roanhorse has said that "being a black and Native kid in Fort Worth in the '70s and '80s was pretty limiting"; thus, she turned to reading and writing, especially science fiction, as a form of escape.
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Rebecca Roanhorse's father was an economics professor, and her mother was a high school English teacher who encouraged Rebecca's early attempts at writing stories.
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Leaders of the Ohkay Owingeh community have stated that Rebecca Roanhorse is not enrolled there and has no connection to their community.
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Rebecca Roanhorse told The New York Times that she initially worked on "Tolkien knockoffs about white farm boys going on journeys", because she figured that is what readers wanted.
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Rebecca Roanhorse wrote a story about Echo, joined by Weshoyot Alvitre on art.
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In 2018 Roanhorse received the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
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Rebecca Roanhorse's first novel, Trail of Lightning, is an "apocalyptic adventure" set in Dinetah, formerly the Navajo reservation in the Southwestern United States, with mostly Navajo characters.
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Critics of Rebecca Roanhorse argue that because the Indigenous community that Rebecca Roanhorse has claimed does not claim her, or her mother that she claims was from the community, this makes her non-Indigenous.
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Rebecca Roanhorse's defenders do not question her claims of Indigenous heritage and have expressed concern that questions about her identity are either racist, due to Roanhorse having a Black father, or a distraction from discussions of her work's content.
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At some point in 2018, when the complaints of cultural appropriation surfaced, references to the Ohkay Owingeh were removed from her official website; Rebecca Roanhorse has stated that she believes her mother's family descended from Ohkay Owingeh people but is "trying to be more careful" about how she discusses it.