Beth Piatote is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of two books: the scholarly monograph Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and the Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), which received honorable mention from the Modern Language Association for the 2014 Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages; and the mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, and short-listed for the California Independent Booksellers Association “Golden Poppy” Prize for Fiction. The Beadworkers has been featured on NPR and selected as the “one read” for multiple university and community programs. Her full-length play, Antikoni, has been supported by workshops and public readings with Native Voices at the Autry, New York Classical Theatre, and the Indigenous Writers Collaborative at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; and her short play, Tricksters, Unite! was featured in the 2022 Native Voices Short Play Festival. She currently holds a playwriting fellowship with AlterTheatre. Her creative and scholarly work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Epiphany, Poetry, World Literature Today, PMLA, American Quarterly, American Literary History, and other major journals and anthologies. She has served as a judge for literary awards for PEN America and the Poetry Foundation. She is currently working on a scholarly monograph on the representation of Native American legal systems through sensory representations (sound, visuality, synesthesia, and haunting) in texts across the long twentieth century; a collection of poems, and a collection of essays.
Beth’s research interests include Native American and Indigenous literature and history, arts, and law; Nez Perce language and literature, and Indigenous language revitalization more broadly; and creative writing. She co-created and now chairs the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization at Berkeley. Currently she serves as the Director of the Arts Research Center, where she has established the Indigenous Poetics Lab to support artistic expression as a means of language revitalization. She holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. She is Nez Perce and an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.
Recent works
Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature
Yale University Press, 2013
Honorable Mention, Modern Language Association Biennial Prize for Studies in Native
American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (2014)
The Beadworkers: Stories
Counterpoint Press, 2019
Longlisted for the Aspen Literary Prize
Longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Prize in Fiction
Shortlisted for the California Booksellers Alliance “Golden Poppy” Prize for Fiction
Animate Forms: Indigenous Law and Literature, scholarly manuscript in progress
Nez Perce Word for Shark, manuscript in progress
Guest Editor (with Chadwick Allen), The Society of American Indians and Its Legacies, special double
issue of SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures 37:3 and American Indian Quarterly
25:2 (Summer 2013)
“No Spoiler Alert”
Forum on Tommy Orange’s There There
In PMLA Vol. 135, No. 3 (May 2020)
“Native Women’s Writing and the Law”
In The Cambridge History of Native American Literature, Ed. Melanie Benson Taylor,
Cambridge University Press, 2020
“Genealogies of Violence and Animations of Indigenous Law in Louise Erdrich’s La Rose”
In Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past, Engaging the Present,
Eds. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Jeffrey Ostler, and Joshua Reid. Northwestern University Press, 2020
“Indian Country: Between Native Claims and Modernist Desires”
In American Literature in Transition, 1910-1920, Ed. Mark W. Van Weinen. Cambridge University Press, 2017
“The Indian/Agent Aporia”
In The Society of American Indians and Its Legacies, SAIL 37:3/AIQ 25:2 (Summer 2013): 45-62
“Domestic Trials: Indian Rights and National Belonging in Works by E. Pauline Johnson and John M. Oskison”
In American Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Spring 2011): 95-116
“Our (Someone Else’s) Father: Articulation, Dysarticulation, and Indigenous Literary Traditions”
In Kenyon Review, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter 2010): 199-21
“Level 8 Risk”
Commissioned short story for the Throughline Series (Life After COVID-19), The San Francisco Chronicle, 16 August 2020, G10
“Oscitation” (original title “Rumblings”)
Commissioned story for Summer Stories Fiction Series, The Spokesman-Review (Spokane), 23 May 2020
Broadcast on The Bookshelf, KPBX 91.1, 7 September 2020
Anthologized in Summer Stories 2020 (Spokane: Gray Dog Press)
Antíkoni (play)
Winner, 2020 Playwrights Retreat and Festival of New Plays, Native Voices at the Autry,
Los Angeles, June 2020
Reading, Native Theater Thursdays, American Indian Community House, New York, August 2020