Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe. Her essay collection White Magic was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Open Book Award, longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award, and named among the best books of 2021 by TIME, the New York Public Library, and NPR. She is the author of My Body Is a Book of Rules and Starvation Mode, and with Theresa Warburton, she co-edited the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. Elissa’s honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Creative Capital award, and the Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award. She is an associate professor at the Ohio State University, where she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her experimental business memoir about money, videogames, and sickness, The Big Score, is forthcoming from Washington Square Press (an imprint of Atria).

Photo credit: Marcus Jackson