Described by Choctaw writer and scholar Louis Owens as “a trickster, contrary, muckraking political journalist and activist, poet, essayist, novelist, and teacher,” and by N. Scott Momaday as “the supreme ironist,” Anishinaabeg author Gerald Vizenor has devoted his career to upsetting the status quo, to deconstructing the term “Indian,” to re-defining the mixed-blood, and to liberating the contemporary Native people he identifies as postindian. The author of more than thirty books in multiple genres including poetry, short fiction, the novel, autobiography, journalism, the essay, as well as theory and criticism, Gerald Vizenor is at once one of the most prolific and one of the most versatile of contemporary Native writers. Widely recognized as a leading writer and scholar of Native literature, the innovative author who gave trickster narrative a contemporary turn, Vizenor has lectured and taught nationally and internationally and his work has been widely disseminated and translated in several languages including German, Italian, and French. Vizenor, who received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas in 2002, has also been the recipient of an American Book Award and a Fiction Collective Award for his 1987 novel, Griever: an American Monkey King in China, and a PEN Oakland Book Award for his 1990 autobiography Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. In deference to his stature as a scholar, in 1978 Vizenor was named to the James J. Hill Visiting Professorship in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and in 1990 to the David Burr Chair at the University of Oklahoma. Through his writing and teaching Vizenor has had an impact on a new generation of Native writers and scholars, recasting the very vocabulary with which they approach Indigenous Studies. As the founder of two Native Literature series at major university presses - Oklahoma and Nebraska, he has also played a major role in creating opportunities for Native critical and creative works to find a place in print. Vizenor's mark in the arena of Native Studies is indeed indelible.