Laura Tohe

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(5 October 1952–)

Laura Tohe is a celebrated Diné (Navajo) poet, essayist, laureate, and scholar whose published work spans four decades. She is also a professor emerita at Arizona State University and a skilled orator and librettist. She has won poetry and book awards, including the 1999 Poetry of the Year Award by the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers for her book No Parole Today and the 2019 American Indian Festival of Words Writer’s Award, and she was the featured poet for the United States Poetry Foundation in 2014. For her distinct perspective and skill, Tohe was named Poet Laureate for the Navajo Nation for 2015–2025 and in 2020 was awarded fifty thousand dollars from the Academy of American Poets to promote writing collectives at the two tribally controlled colleges on the Navajo Nation, or Navajoland. She is recognized for the way her works exemplify Diné intellectual traditions in a contemporary style, and for sharing Diné oral stories and history in both Diné bizaad (Navajo language) and English.

Diné introductory clan protocol is matrilineal. Tohe is Tsenahabiłnii, Sleepy Rock People Clan (her mother’s maternal clan), born for Todích’íi’nii, Bitter Water Clan (her father’s maternal clan). She is also Jóhonaa’éí Tółaní dęę, Sun People Clan (her mother’s paternal clan) and Maa’ii Deeshgiizhnii, Coyote Pass People Clan (her father’s paternal clan). She grew up in the Ch’ooshgai Mountains in Crystal, New Mexico, with her mother, Laura Florence. This introduction delineates Tohe’s generations of Tsenahabiłnii clan membership.

Tohe was born October 5, 1952, in Fort Defiance, Arizona. Her mother was a weaver of Navajo rugs and a cook at the Bureau of Indian Affairs day school in Crystal, New Mexico, where Tohe attended elementary school. In a conversation with the present author on January 17, 2024, Tohe shared that, while her early schooling occurred on Navajoland, she moved at fifteen years of age to Albuquerque, New Mexico. There, she stayed at the Albuquerque Indian School, a boarding school, but participated in a program at a local public high school. Whether her family was near or far, Tohe’s writings on her school experiences reflect how she, a Diné woman, retained the rooted female qualities of leadership, strength, and identity, despite the efforts of many institutional and colonial forces to eradicate Indigenous Peoples’ cultural characteristics.

Tohe’s Diné upbringing included ceremonies that mark important phases in female life and are supported by matrilineal relatives. In a Wíčazo Ša Review article, “There Is No Word for Feminism in My Language,” Tohe elaborates on how her family celebrated her coming-of-age with a Kinaaldá ceremony, which is the same ceremony that the deity Changing Woman had when she reached puberty, as retold in oral stories. She describes the honour of every aspect of the four-day ceremony, which ushers a young woman into a society that values her. She also describes how puberty is handled differently in Western culture, namely in schools, where the message young women receive is that they have reached an age of embarrassment. Gender is experienced differently in Tohe’s matrilineal culture. Her perspective on female life is one of empowerment; of a life modelled after Changing Woman. Simply saying the name “Changing Woman” brings about reverence and, as Tohe identifies with her, she has led a life of self-respect.

Tohe graduated from the University of New Mexico (UNM) with a bachelor of arts in psychology in 1975. While she did not start out in a writing program, Rudolfo A. Anaya notes that she was attending UNM at a time of burgeoning Native American literature, with many influential writers also at UNM as instructors or students, including Simon Ortiz (Acoma), Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), Leslie Marmon Silko (Acoma), and Luci Tapahonso (Diné). Harjo recalls the seventies, when she, Tohe, and Tapahonso were students at UNM, as “a time of Native rights movements and the discussion and implementation of tribal nation sovereignty” (“Diné Reader”). Tohe has also remarked on this era’s impact on her, saying she became politically conscious of the treatment of Indigenous Peoples by the US government and, because of that exposure, she began to include Native history in her writing (Bruner). Tohe has told Arizona Republic reporter Elizabeth Montgomery that she realized the importance of voicing her experience because “writing is political when you make the invisible visible.”

In the 1980s, Tohe returned to UNM to study creative writing, taking courses taught by Rudolfo Anaya, a prominent author of Chicano literature (notably the 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima) and UNM English professor. Tohe credits Anaya with encouraging her distinct Diné voice, saying he urged her to draw inspiration from her background (Easterling). Her first short story, “Willow Man’s Children,” was published in the 1981 collection A Ceremony of Brotherhood, 1680–1980, edited by Anaya and Ortiz. A Diné moral story, it starts out with hope and appreciation for a content Diné life before introducing gambling. Willow Man and his wife, Bread Woman, eventually gamble away all their life necessities and neglect their two young children, who are left to fend for themselves by digging holes to hide in the earth and eating hard plants. They then turn into prairie dogs.

In the same year, she participated in a writing workshop with peers from northern New Mexico. Together, they published the 1982 anthology Resiembra (Spanish for “reseed”). Editors Jim Sagel and colleagues share in their preface that the workshop’s vision was to encourage blossoming and established writers to “share their visions and versions of reality.” The poems by Tohe are “To Shimá Sání,” an ode to her maternal grandmother, and “The Shooting,” which describes the jealous anger of a husband who hides in wait before shooting his wife and then himself. Both poems are set on or near the Navajo Nation and feature towns familiar to Diné people, including Gallup, Lupton, and Tohatchi.

Tohe’s poems for Resiembra, along with “Cat or Stomp” and “At Mexican Springs,” are also included in Joseph Bruchac’s Songs from This Earth on Turtle’s Back: Contemporary Indian Poetry (1983). “Cat or Stomp” describes new kids at school hopping off the bus being categorized as cowboys or cowgirls (“stomps”) or as bell-bottom-wearing, Rolling Stones-listening hipsters (“cats”). “At Mexican Springs” expresses the conflict between negative perceptions of Diné people in the reservation border town Gallup and embracing attitudes in the reservation town Mexican Springs, where sustenance is found by Navajo people. “At Mexican Springs” has been translated into French and included in Anthologie de la poésie amérindienne (1989). Two of her more widely circulated and translated poems, “Female Rain” and “Male Rain,” were also initially published in this anthology. It is clear that, from this point onward, Tohe’s writing centres on giving voice to her Diné worldview.

Tohe then attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (UNL) and received her master of arts in creative writing and literature in 1985. At UNL, she wrote the chapbook Making Friends with Water, published in 1986 by Nosila Press and now out of print. In it, she recomposes “Female Rain” into Diné bizaad as “Niłtsą́ Bi’áád.” The poem, later republished in Tséyi, Deep in the Rock (2005), introduces readers to Tohe’s gentle and nurturing language of birth, appropriate for her reintroduction to the world of poetry written in her first language:¹

Niłtsą́ bi’áád

Shá’di’ááhdę́ę’go dah naaldogo’ alzhish

k’ós hazlįį’

honeezk’ází

niłtsą́ bi’áád bitázhool bijooltsą́

áádóó niłtsą́ bi’áád biyázhí bídii’na’

 

Naaniiniiłkaahgo

niłtsą́ bi’áád biyázhí hazlį́į́’

ch’íl látah hózhóón dahtoo’bee ’ałch’į’ háazhah

áádóó nihik’inizdidláád

 

Female Rain

Dancing from the south

cloudy cool and gray

pregnant with rainchild

 

At dawn she gives birth to a gentle mist

flowers bow with wet sustenance

luminescence all around

Anaya remained a mentor to Tohe while she worked toward her doctorate at UNL. As editor of Blue Mesa Review, he included her poem “Body Identified” in the literary magazine’s second issue (1990), which also lists Tohe as an honorable mention for the Urban Enhancement Cultural Achievement Award for Poetry. “Body Identified” describes a young woman who, while reading a newspaper, learns of the death of her first love from a headline: “Young male Indian in early 20s found alongside the highway near Twin Lakes.” Recalling her confessions of love, the speaker mourns, “words I uttered weren’t enough to keep you,” and describes her desire, after the funeral service, “to swerve off the highway and into the sagebrush.” She also includes this poem in her dissertation and eventual first book, No Parole Today.

In 1993, Tohe submitted the manuscript of No Parole Today to her dissertation committee, completing the requirements for her PhD in creative writing and literature at UNL. Her creative dissertation reflects and dramatizes the attempted colonial assimilation, through schooling, of Native American people. She notes that while she writes these experiences in the first person, she narrates accounts of her grandmothers, grandfathers, parents, and close relatives in addition to her own. The themes in No Parole Today include family separation, alienation, oral tradition, boarding school, and Navajo culture.

The book version of No Parole Today, published by West End Press in 1999 and edited by Ortiz, stayed mostly consistent with the dissertation, but Tohe revised and expanded the introduction into a “Letter to General Pratt” and revised the order and some titles of the poems and short stories. There is also a noteworthy change to a word. Throughout the published version, Tohe substitutes the Diné bizaad word “Diné” (meaning “The People”) for the exonym “Navajo.” This replacement highlights Tohe’s practice of writing in Diné bizaad first and in English second. In his study of No Parole Today, Anthony K. Webster comments that “there is no explicit statement concerning the relative value of one language or another (“Imagining”). Instead, Tohe presents an image of Navajos using language to create affective bonds between Navajos.” The use of memories shared between Diné speakers at Indian boarding schools as the context of the book also provides insight into the intimacy of language ideologies. Throughout No Parole Today, Diné bizaad provides comfort to students in an educational setting designed to forcibly take away the Navajo language. In 1999, No Parole Today and Making Friends with Water earned Tohe the above-mentioned Wordcraft Poetry of the Year Award.

After attaining her PhD from UNL, Tohe became an assistant professor in the English department at Arizona State University (ASU). Her career at ASU has included appointments as affiliated faculty in the women’s studies, American Indian studies, and creative writing programs; promotion to associate and then full professor of English; and a faculty fellowship at Barrett, The Honors College. Tohe is now a professor emerita at ASU, where she continues to write and publish.

Tohe co-edited Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community with Heid E. Erdrich in 2002. Both editors set out to collect a variety of Native women writers representative of “Indian Country.” This anthology is for both those familiar with Indigenous cultural traditions in what is today North America and those unfamiliar with the lives and ways of contemporary Native women. Identifying themes of community and sisterhood throughout, Tohe and Erdrich organize the writings into four sections: “Changing Women,” “Strong Hearts,” “New Age Pocahontas,” and “In the Arms of the Skies.” Tohe provides an introduction for the section “Changing Women,” which features poems and short stories highlighting power and transformation during women’s lives, again, from various tribal perspectives. The section’s name alludes to Changing Woman, a holy being in Diné creation stories who also manifests in other tribal stories, such as Red Sky Woman of the Monacan. All of the writers describe the challenges of life and the daily creations of women, including making dishes from local food sources, singing songs while herb gathering, and quilting with remnants of cloth.

Tohe contributed “In Dinétah” to the “Strong Hearts” section. This poem is about hardships endured by Diné ancestors during the Navajo Long Walk period, which began with the rounding up of Diné in 1863 and resulted in years-long internment at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The Diné refer to the walk’s prison destination as Hwéeldi: a place of starvation, a place of near-death, and a place of extreme hardship. Tohe’s story of the Long Walk relates an important point in Diné history with the US when Diné leaders began negotiations to return to Dinétah, the traditional Diné homeland, before the actual signing of the Treaty of 1868.

Tohe also wrote the introduction for the section “In the Arms of the Skies,” which brings to light the human aspect of romantic love experienced and expressed by Native women. She contributes two poems, including “The Big Rectangle,” a poem of anticipation and the possibility of love in the desert, and “Tsoodził,” named for the Diné sacred mountain in the south of Dinétah. In “Tsoodził,” Tohe relates how the mountainous lava rock is enhanced by scents of orange blossoms that bring memories of a beloved and their conversations. The last stanza reads:

I want to travel all the colors of the worlds with you

to arrive in this Glittering World

held in your swollen male clouds

and your hand on my thigh

that causes the world to grow

again and again

without Fine,

without end

your sweet music

pouring forth like

rain

rain

rain

rain . . .

Other noted contributors to Sister Nations include 2019–2022 United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), activist and former vice-presidential candidate Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe), best-selling authors Louise Erdrich (Anishinaabe) and Diane Glancy (Cherokee), Native American studies scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux), and the fifty-fourth US secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo).

Tséyi’, Deep in the Rock: Reflections on Canyon de Chelly, a book of poetry by Tohe with photography by Stephen Strom, was published by University of Arizona Press in 2005. Tséyi’, or “the place deep in the rock,” refers to Canyon de Chelly in the heart of Navajoland, a setting that inspires many of Tohe’s poems. While Tohe is not from this area of Navajoland, she has repeatedly visited the canyon to marvel at the view and think about the history of the Diné in the canyon. Present-day life in the canyon, with its views of the rim and the family corn fields, orchards, and horses, can appear idyllic, but it takes tenacity to live in a place with no running water or electricity. The canyon walls tell stories, with their gunshot holes and pictographs by Diné ancestors who were forced to leave during the enactment of the US government’s scorched-earth policy and the Long Walk campaign, which Tohe describes in “Canyon del Muerto.” Tséyi’, Deep in the Rock, includes poetry and prose recounting and reclaiming Diné lifeways in this beautiful canyon. In her 2008 review in Studies in American Indian Literatures, Delilah G. Orr notes that in several poems in Tséyi’, Tohe retells these historical events with themes of reaffirmation of identity and kinship to the land.

One poem that stands out is “Niłtsą́ Bika’,” “Male Rain,” which complements “Niłtsą́ Bi’áád,” “Female Rain”:

Aadęę’ łįį’ diłhiłgo tłéé’ nahalingo bił ch’éldloozh

Báhách’į’go naayéé’ee k’ehgo ts’ida deesk’aazgo áhoolaa

tó yílaad dóó níyol tsoh áhoolaa

 

Hashké níłtsá bika’ naazbaa’

Tłéé’ bíighah atah názhnoodahgo yiská

Áádóó łįį bił anááldloozh

Anaa’ yęę t’áá ákóógo’ aliilaa

 

He comes riding a dark horse

  angry    malevolent     cold

 

bringing floods and heavy winds

Warrior rain    having a 49 night

then rides away leaving

his enemy behind.

Here, Tohe exemplifies the Diné philosophy of life’s innate balance and duality by pairing “Female Rain” with “Male Rain.” The feeling of female rain, from a Diné perspective, is gentle and nourishing, while the feeling of male rain is more forceful and comes and leaves quickly. Orr also notices that, in Tséyi’, Tohe makes evident how, through the powerful presence of the past, it is possible to be simultaneously traditional and tribal, modern and global; Orr concludes that Tséyi’, Deep in the Rock is authentic and uncanny. With this authentic voice, Tohe highlights Diné culture and embodies it in her poetry while providing deep history that includes colonial bloodshed and the strength of Diné people. Tséyí, Deep in the Rock won the Southwest Book of the Year from the Tucson Pima Library in 2005 and the Glyph Award for Best Poetry and Best Book from the Arizona Book Association in 2007.

In 2007, Tohe was commissioned by composer Mark Grey and then-Arizona Symphony conductor Michael Christie to write a libretto (that is, a text for an extended musical vocal work). The result was Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio, a story of a Diné warrior suffering the trauma of combat in a foreign war. Enemy Slayer, a Diné deity called Naayéé Neezgháni (sometimes translated as Monster Slayer), is part of Diné creation stories, where he is called upon to defend the Diné and defeat monsters. In Enemy Slayer, defeating monsters is an analogy for self-reflection and healing after trauma. Tohe describes the soldier in war and, after the war, his need for a Diné healing ritual in order to reintegrate into society as a veteran. In his review of the libretto in Fanfare, Ronald E. Grames observes the way Enemy Slayer bridges Navajo and non-Navajo worlds. Grames notes that, by bridging Western and Native American cultures, the distinctive and transformative text serves a great purpose.

The theme of postwar trauma explored in Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio is familiar to Tohe. Her father, Benson Tohe, was a World War II veteran who served as a Navajo Code Talker, or one of hundreds of Diné members of the US Marines who were enlisted to create a coded version of their language for wartime use. Code Talker Stories, Tohe’s next book, was published in 2012 by Rio Nuevo Publishers. This endeavour began in 2007, when Tohe prepared to interview surviving code talkers. Growing up, she was not aware that her father had been a code talker. Her father never talked about the war with her until 1982, when he attended an event in Washington, DC, that celebrated the role of the Navajo code in the Allies winning World War II and where then-President Ronald Reagan proclaimed August 14 National Navajo Code Talkers Day. Even after that, Tohe’s father would tell parts of his story but would rarely mention fighting. Tohe prepared for the interviews by recognizing that other code talkers might, like her father, be reticent about sharing their experiences and stories.

The story of the Navajo Code Talkers is a story of the Navajo language. The interviews in Code Talker Stories provide the backstories of these veterans and explain how, as young men, they became part of a unique and classified set of units. Indigenous languages had been used in previous wars, but the creation of a code using Diné bizaad was new. The US Marines were actively recruiting young Navajo men because of their tough upbringing; they were also looking for men who could speak both Navajo and English (Philip Johnston Archival Collection, Northern Arizona University). Common features of the men’s stories include Indian boarding schools, Navajo teachings of prayer and discipline, and the beauty and strength of the Navajo language. Tohe often records the men’s high regard for the Navajo language:

Dan Akee from Coal Mine, Arizona state[s] that “our language is sacred and it represents the part of life that is true; it saved a lot of people.”

Samuel Holiday from the Monument Valley area of the Navajo Nation [says], “our language was given to us as a sacred language. It’s holy. That’s why our language can withstand anything. We use it to speak and pray with. I keep our language sacred.”

Tom Jones, from the area called Hogback, New Mexico proclaim[s], “it was given to us, it is our language, from where it was created is ours. When we speak with it, it is sacred. It is carried on, and from it life continues.”

Each of the code talkers sheds light on how the Navajo language is sacred and powerful. The Japanese, who were excellent at breaking codes in World War II, could not break the one based on it. Figures including past president George W. Bush have acknowledged that the US helped secure the Allied victory because of the Navajo Code and Navajo Code Talkers (Jevec). The code talkers who survived, like the soldier in Enemy Slayer, needed ceremony about the enemy in war and about rebalancing their individual lives in order to reintegrate into their homes. After their return from World War II, many of the Navajo Code Talkers also participated in ceremonies of restoration, as one veteran, John Kinsel of Lukachukai, Arizona, shares: “it is said that the Holy People gave The People a sacred ceremony that would help the veteran recover from the violence and bloodshed of war.” Mr. Kinsel had such a ceremony after he returned to restore him to spiritual health with the help of the sacred Diné language, applied as medicine in songs. Tohe’s project of interviewing Navajo Code Talkers for Code Talker Stories and respectful use of her first language emphasize her and her interviewees’ shared upbringing in Diné lifeways.

In 2018, Tohe was commissioned to write a second libretto, evidence that her poetry transcends cultures and is sought after worldwide. Nahasdzáán in the Glittering World, written in collaboration with composer Thierry Pécou, was performed at the Rouen Opera House in Normandy, France. While this was an international collaboration, Tohe kept her cultural approach to writing by thinking of the libretto first in Diné bizaad and then translating it into English. Excerpts of the operatic dance work are available on YouTube.

In addition to this international recognition, Tohe and her work were celebrated by the Navajo Nation and Navajo Technical University, who named her the second Navajo Nation Poet Laureate (2015–2025), the first having being Luci Tapahonso. In 2020, a fifty-thousand-dollar laureate fellowship from the Academy of American Poets provided funding for Tohe to promote writing collectives as an organizer and mentor at the Navajo Nation’s Diné College and Navajo Technical University. In January 2026, she was named the 2026–2028 Arizona Poet Laureate.

Tohe understood her duties as a laureate fellow to include promoting pride and respect for the Navajo people, language, and culture; supporting literacy in Navajo and English; and encouraging self-esteem among Navajo youth. In an interview with Kaila White, Tohe says she also wanted to promote other Navajo writers and see their works become part of the curriculum in schools on the reservation.

In April 2025, Tohe passed her position as Navajo Nation Laureate to Matthew Jake Skeets at the Shił Nahólne Literary Symposium, hosted by Navajo Technical University. At the symposium, which I attended, Tohe read her then-most-recent prose, “I Am Dressed in My Language,” published in Diné Poetics (2025), a special issue of Poetry, the official magazine of the Academy of American Poets. The essay’s familiar themes of language loss and revitalization brought to mind a letter that my own Diné grandmother wrote to herself, in which she recalled how she would hear English and mentally translate it into her first language, Diné bizaad. As Tohe writes, “Navajo speakers still thought in Navajo, dreamed in Navajo . . . our tongues still belonged to us.”

As an Indigenous scholar, Tohe recognizes the importance of her writing as a way of sharing herself with future readers, and acknowledges that her legacy as a Diné author may allow other Diné writers to follow in her footsteps. She has donated considerable personal and professional material to the Arizona State University Library, resulting in two archival collections that can be accessed at the library’s Labriola National American Indian Data Center. One is the Laura Tohe Papers, 1980–2010, which contains interviews by students, professional papers, correspondence, and other manuscript and audiovisual material. The other collection is the American Indian and Poetry Collection, which consists of five creative writing manuscripts by Tohe’s English students in 2002. These valuable archival materials reinforce the importance of collecting the papers of contemporary Indigenous writers.

Outside of teaching at ASU and participating in events related to her writing, Tohe leads a private life in Phoenix, Arizona. She acknowledges her husband, Doug Tillman, and two sons, Deswood and Jerame, in her dissertation and includes her blossoming family in the poem “Autobiography 1.” On occasion, she performs her poetry accompanied by Deswood on guitar.

Laura Tohe is a distinct voice in Diné poetry and prose. Her work is valuable because she comments on important matters of Navajo identity. Tohe identifies as a Diné woman, as a Diné educator, and as a writer of Diné history. In “Navajo Transformative Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century,” Tohe’s colleague in American Indian studies Lloyd L. Lee describes Tohe as someone who exemplifies the need to learn, remember, and tell the histories of the Diné people, a practice he says is fundamental to the Diné intellectual tradition. As Tohe’s own mother once said, “Without stories you are an empty person” (qtd. in Code Talker Stories). Tohe’s body of work exemplifies survivance through restoring the omitted history of the Diné.

Bibliography

Books

Making Friends with Water. Nosila Press, 1986.

No Parole Today. West End Press, 1999.

Tséyi’: Deep in the Rock: Reflections on Canyon de Chelly. Photographs by Stephen E. Strom, U of Arizona P, 2005.

Code Talker Stories. Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2012.

Translations

“Aux sources du Mexique,” “Pluie Féminine,” and “Pluie Mâle.” Translated by Manuel Van Thienen in Anthologie de la poésie amérindienne, edited by Van Thienen, Le Temps des Cerises, 1989. Vol. 42 of Bacchanales.

“Chants cartographiques des grues des dunes.” Translated by Jean-René Lassalle, “Poèmes du bord de l’extinction,” Poesibao, 6 Jan. 2023, https://poesibao.fr/chris-mccabe-traductions-jr-lassalle.

Librettos

Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio. Music by MarkeGrey, Naxos, 2008.

Nahasdzáán in the Glittering World. Music by Thierry Pécou, Schott Music, 2019.

Anthologized Works

“Willow Man’s Children.” A Ceremony of Brotherhood, 1680–1980, edited by Rudolfo A. Anaya and Simon J. Ortiz, Academia Press, 1981, p. 25.

“To Shimá Sání,” “The Shooting.” Resiembra, edited by Jim Sagel et al., Conjunto Cultural Norteno, Northern Community College Press, 1982, pp. 4–5.

“To Shimá Sání,” “The Shooting,” “Cat or Stomp,” “Female Rain,” “Male Rain,” “At Mexican Springs.” Songs from This Earth on Turtle’s Back: Contemporary American Indian Poetry, edited by Joseph Bruchac, Greenfield Review Press, 1983, pp. 253–56.

“Blue Horses Running.” Returning the Gift: Poetry and Prose from the First North American Native Writers’ Festival, Sun Tracks and U of Arizona P, 1994, p. 29.

“She Was Telling It This Way.” Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writing of North America, edited by Joy Harjo et al., W. W. Norton, 1997, pp. 41–43.

“Dééł Biyiin”/“Map Songs of the Sandhill Cranes.” Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry of Endangered Languages, edited by Chris McCabe, Chambers, 2019, pp. 92–95.

“Japanese Garden.” Poets.org, 11 Nov. 2019, https://poets.org/poem/japanese-garden. Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series.

“Within Dinétah, the People’s Spirit Remains Strong.” Living Nations, Living Worlds: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, edited by Joy Harjo, W. W. Norton, 2021, pp. 193–99.

“Our Tongues Slapped Into Silence,” “Joe Babe,” “Easter Sunday,” “Within Dinétah the People’s Spirit Remains Strong,” “Tsoodził, Mountain to the South,” “Deep in the Rock,” “Niłtsą́ Bi’áád/Female Rain,” in The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, edited by Esther G. Belin et al., U of Arizona P, 2021, pp. 118–32.

Selected Periodical Publications

“Body Identified.” Blue Mesa Review, vol 1, no. 2, 1990, p. 135.

“Joe-Babes.” Callaloo, vol. 17, no. 1, 1994, pp. 320–21.

“Snake Lover.” Callaloo, vol. 17, no. 1, 1994, pp. 322–24.

Review of Ocean Power by Ofelia Zepeda. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 22, no 2, 1998, p. 296.

“There is No Word for Feminism in My Language.” Wíčazo Ša Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 2000, pp. 103–10.

“It Was That Indian: Simon Ortiz, Activist Poet.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 16, no. 4, 2004, pp. 54–56.

“Refugees in Our Own Land.” Ploughshares, vol. 30, no. 4, 2004–2005, p. 154.

“Hwéeldi Bééhániih: Remembering the Long Walk.” Wíčazo Ša Review, vol. 22, no. 1, 2007, pp. 77–82.

“Autobiography 1.” World Literature Today, vol. 81, no. 5, 2007, pp. 42–43.

“Blue Impala, and: Dancing Under the Stars.” Cream City Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2014, pp. 49–53.

“Moth Madness.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 61, no. 4, 2020, pp. 647–48.

“Code Talkers: America’s Secret Weapon in World War II.” Humanities, vol. 43, no. 3, 2022, pp. 18–19.

“How to Sell a Weaving.” El Palacio: Art, History, and Culture of the Southwest, 2023. https://elpalacio.org/2023/09/the-poetry-of-belonging.

“I Am Dressed in My Language.” Diné Poetics, special issue of Poetry, edited by Esther Belin, vol. 5, no. 225, 2025, pp. 406–09.

 

Other

No Parole Today. 1994. U of Nebraska at Lincoln, PhD dissertation.

“A Contextual Statement Surrounding Three Poems of Prejudice.” Communicating Prejudice, edited by Michael L. Hecht, Sage Publications, 1998, pp. 246–56.

Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community, edited by Heid E. Erdrich and Tohe, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002.

Dancing With the Wind, edited by Tohe, ArtsReach, 2004.

“Tom Snag.” Phoenix Noir (Akashic Noir), edited by Patrick Millikin, Akashic Books, 2009, pp. 148–59.

“Grounded in Spiritual Geography: Restoring Naabaahii in Enemy Slayer, A Navajo Oratorio.” Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies, edited by Salma Monani and Joni Adamson, Routledge, 2016, pp. 82–97.

 

Selected Interviews

Terrill, Marshall. “ASU Professor Named Navajo Nation Poet Laureate,” ASU News, 11 Sept. 2015, https://news.asu.edu/content/asu-professor-named-navajo-nation-poet-laureate.

Vandever, Daniel. “Navajo Technical University Introduces the New Navajo Nation Poet Laureate.” Tribal College Journal, 11 Sept. 2015, https://tribalcollegejournal.org/navajo-technical-university-introduces-the-new-navajo-nation-poet-laureate.

White, Kaila. “ASU Professor Laura Tohe Named Navajo Nation’s Second Poet Laureate.” azcentral, 25 Sept. 2015, https://azcentral.com/story/news/local/tempe/2015/09/25/asu-professor-navajo-nation-poet-laureate-laura-tohe/72713012.

Price, V. B., and Leslie Linthicum. “Poetry in Public: A Conversation with UNM’s Poet Laureates.” Mirage Magazine, with Tohe et al., vol. 36, no. 1, 2016, pp. 14–19. Issuu, https://issuu.com/unm-alumni-association/docs/mirage_s16.

“Dr. Laura Tohe Named as Poet Laureate for the State of Arizona.” YouTube, uploaded by 12News.com, 21 Jan. 2026, https://youtube.com/watch?v=EK-x8KUzvjk.

Hammond, Andrew. “‘My Father the Navajo Code Talker’—with Laura Tohe.” SpyCast, episode 611, 14 Nov. 2023. Apple Podcasts, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/spycast/id201680433?i=1000634765013.

Note

1. I would like to thank Laura for sharing the English and Diné bizaad versions of the poem with me via email on October 17, 2022.

 

Works Cited

Anaya, Rudolfo A. Introduction to Ceremony of Brotherhood. 1980. Rudolfo A. Anaya Papers, Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, U of New Mexico Libraries, Albuquerque. Typescript.

Bruner, Betsy. “Tohe Writes of Memories Brutal, Beautiful.” Arizona Daily Sun, 15 Apr. 2004, https://azdailysun.com/tohe-writes-of-memories-brutal-beautiful/article_ceec5aca-9954-5877-bc0b-29d32fae4846.html.

Easterling, Mike. “County Native Is Navajo Nation Poet Laureate.” Argus Leader, 28 Oct. 2015, https://argusleader.com/story/entertainment/books/2015/10/28/county-native-navajo-nation-poet-laureate/74562304.

Grames, Ronald E. “Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio.” Fanfare: The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors, vol. 33, no. 2, 2009, pp. 176–77.

Jevec, Adam. “Navajo Code Talkers.” Prologue Magazine, National Archives and Records Administration, winter 2001, https://archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/winter/navajo-code-talkers.html.

Lee, Lloyd L. “Navajo Transformative Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century.” Wíčazo Ša Review, vol. 25, no. 1, 2010, pp. 33–45.

Montgomery, Elizabeth. “Writing Was Her Dream. Now the Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation Is Paying It Forward.” azcentral, 16 June 2020, https://azcentral.com/story/entertainment/arts/2020/06/16/navajo-nation-poet-laureate-laura-tohe/5339037002.

Orr, Delilah G. “Tséyi/Deep in the Rock: Reflections on Canyon De Chelly (Review).” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 20, no. 1, 2008, pp. 90–92.

Johnston, Philip. Navajo Code Talkers Project. 1943. Philip Johnston Papers, 1896–1982, Northern Arizona U Library, Flagstaff. Typescript.

Sagel, Jim, et al. Preface. Resiembra: An Anthology of Writings, edited by Sagel et al., Conjunto Cultural Norteno, Northern Community College Press, 1982, pp. 4–5.

Webster, Anthony K. “Imagining Navajo in the Boarding School: Laura Tohe’s ‘No Parole Today’ and the Intimacy of Language Ideologies.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol. 20, no. 1, 2010, pp. 39–62.

 

Jolene Dezbah Manus is an assistant professor and the Native American curator for the College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences at the University of New Mexico. Manus is centred in the Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, where she works with tribes to articulate culturally appropriate guidelines for cultural items in archival collections. She also wrote the scope of collections for UNM University Libraries’ Distinctive Native American Collections, which emphasizes collecting materials and scholarship from Indigenous academics, educators, creators, and knowledge holders with respect to Indigenous information research and protocol. Jolene is a citizen of the Navajo Nation.