N. Scott Momaday

Navarro Scott Momaday, a Kiowa, was born on February 27, 1934, in Lawton, Oklahoma, and grew up with close ties to the Navajo and San Carlos Apache communities. He earned his BA in political science from the University of New Mexico in 1958. He later pursued his MA and PhD in English from Stanford University, completing them in 1960 and 1963, respectively. Momaday's poetry collections include "In the Bear's House" (St. Martin's Press, 1999), "In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961–1991" (University of New Mexico Press, 1992), and "The Gourd Dancer" (HarperCollins, 1976). His debut novel, "House Made of Dawn" (New American Library, 1969), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has authored several other novels, prose collections, as well as the children's book "Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story" (Clear Light Publishers, 1994) and the collection of plays "Three Plays: The Indolent Boys, Children of the Sun, and The Moon in Two Windows" (University of Oklahoma, 2007). Additionally, he has served as an editor for various anthologies and collections.

Momaday's notable honors include the 2019 Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, bestowed by the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation to recognize lifetime accomplishments in literature and promote the idea that peace can be achieved through words. He has also received the 2019 Ken Burns American Heritage Prize, the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement, an Academy of American Poets Prize, an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Premio Letterario Internationale "Mondello," Italy's highest literary award. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. With twenty-one honorary degrees from esteemed American colleges and universities, including Yale, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Wisconsin, Momaday holds a prominent position in academia.

As a founding Trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian, Momaday has played an instrumental role in shaping indigenous representation and cultural preservation. He also serves on the Boards of the First Nations Development Institute and the School of American Research. Throughout his career, he has held tenured professorships at Stanford University, the University of Arizona, and the University of California, Berkeley. Additionally, he has served as a visiting professor at Columbia and Princeton universities, as well as in Moscow. Currently, Momaday holds the position of Regents Professor of the Humanities at the University of Arizona.