Deborah Taffa

Deborah Taffa's stories have appeared in LARB, the Best American Nonrequired Reading, PANK, Salon Magazine, A Public Space, the Rumpus, the Best of Brevity, the Huff Post, and other places. Her first manuscript, a memoir about growing up on the Yuma and Navajo reservations, was awarded the Santa Fe Writer's Literary Award by Carmen Maria Machado in 2019.

Deborah earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa and teaches the same at Webster University. She's received fellowships to the New York State Summer Writers Institute and won the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award in 2019. She co-wrote "Digadohi: Lands, Cherokee, and the Trail of Tears," a documentary that debuted on PBS in August, 2020. She is an enrolled member of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and a recognized descendant at Laguna Pueblo. She currently lives in Hawaii, where she loves to hike, swim, do yoga, and row.