Brandy Nālani McDougall

Born and raised on Maui, Brandy Nālani McDougall earned a BA from Whittier College and an MFA from the University of Oregon and is a PhD candidate at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She also studied at the University of Auckland. McDougall is the author of the poetry collection The Salt-Wind / Ka Makani Pa‘akai (2008) and the scholarly monograph Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature (2016). Her writing appears in Effigies: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing (2009), edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. In a review of McDougall’s work, Craig Santos Perez says, “She wrestles with historical and contemporary colonialism in her homeland through the themes of language, education, and exoticism. … McDougall seamlessly weaves together Hawaiian language and English to create a complex, bilingual texture.”

McDougall teaches at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.