Janet McAdams


Janet McAdams is an American poet of Alabama Creek, Scottish, and Irish descent. She wrote The Island of Lost Luggage which received an American Book Award in 2001 and the First Book Award for Poetry from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas in 1999. She is also the editor of Salt Publishing's Earthworks Series of Native poets. In addition, she's worked as a telephone operator, a cartographer, a camp counselor, a maid, a cook, and an exercise instructor for people with developmental disabilities.
Her first novel, Red Weather, is about a Native American's trip to a small Central American country in search of her activist parents.
She received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Emory University, where her studies focused on American Indian poetry. She has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Alabama, the American School of El Salvador, the University of Oklahoma, and is presently the Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Poetry at Kenyon College.

Works