Tanaya Winder

Poet, writer, and educator Tanaya Winder is an enrolled member of the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe and has ancestors from the Southern Ute, Pyramid Lake Paiute, Navajo, and Black tribes. She grew up on the Southern Ute reservation in Ignacio, Colorado, and earned her BA at Stanford and an MFA from the University of New Mexico. Winder’s collections of poetry include Words Like Love (2015) and Why Storms are Named After People and Bullets Remain Nameless (2017). Poetic Theater Productions performed a suite of Winder’s poems as Love in a Time of Blood Quantum, and she won an Orlando Prize in poetry from the A Room of Her Own Foundation.

Winder centers her poetry and activity around expressing and building community. In an interview with Zingara Poetry Review, Winder notes, “I am a person who hopes my own writing and poetry reflects the times and the needs of society; without interacting with the community the poetry cannot attempt to reflect communities and so I believe poetry must intersect with community. Poetry has the potential to create community for people who are searching for it by providing a space to interact and share experiences on the page.”

Winder cofounded As/Us, an online journal devoted to writers of color; cofounded the traveling exhibit Sing Our Rivers Red to raise awareness of missing and murdered indigenous women; and founded Dream Warriors Management, a company that manages indigenous artists. The National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development named her one of “40 Under 40” emerging American Indian leaders, and she was a 2017 First Peoples Fund Artists in Business Leadership fellow.

Winder lectures and teaches widely and is the director of the Upward Bound Program at the University of Colorado.