Anita Endrezze

Anita Endrezze is Yaqui on her father’s side and of European descent—Italian, Slovenian, and German-Romanian—on her mother’s. She was born in Long Beach, California, and lives in Washington. Endrezze received a BA in secondary education with minors in art and Spanish and an MA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University. A poet and short-story writer, she has written many books including A Thousand Branches (2014), Butterfly Moon (2012), Throwing fire at the sun, water at the moon (2000), The humming of stars and bees and waves: poems and short stories (1998), at the helm of twilight (1992), and The north people (1983). Her poetry has earned her the Weyerhaeuser/Bumbershoot Award and the Governor’s Writing Award for Washington State.

Endrezze is also a storyteller and artist whose paintings have appeared on book covers and in shows at the Dylan Thomas Center, Wales; the Electric Theatre, Guildford, England; the Poetry Library of London; and the Chase Gallery in Spokane, Washington. Fluent in Danish, she is the author of a novel for children, Bjerget og Skystsaanden (The Mountain and the Guardian Spirit) (1986).

Endrezze writes from her experience as a Native American woman. Poet Leslie Ullman, reviewing at the helm of twilight for the Kenyon Review, commented that Endrezze’s “collection … is luxuriant with fragments of myth, the voices of different personae, striking visual images and always, as a backdrop, metaphors interweaving the natural world with the landscape of human emotion.”