About this item
A 2024 Anthem Awards winner for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (Awareness & Media category) Through art photography and prose, this book addresses the fragility, beauty, and cultural value of preserving endangered languages, particularly Indigenous languages, at a time when Indigenous and diversity issues are at the forefront of our national conversations. In a groundbreaking project turned into a national touring exhibition, endangered-language speaker, poet, and photojournalist B. A. Van Sise worked with endangered-language speakers, learners, and revitalizers across three years and an entire continent to showcase some of the natural beauties of their languages and lands, highlighting, in particular, American diversity and its many Indigenous communities.
About the Author
B.A. Van Sise is an author and photographic artist with three monographs: the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry with Mary-Louise Parker, Invited to Life: After the Holocaust with Neil Gaiman and On the National Language: The Poetry of America's Endangered Tongues with DeLanna Studi and Linda Hogan. His artwork has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Center for Creative Photography, the Skirball Cultural Center, the Woody Guthrie Center, and the Rockefeller Arts Center, as well as in group exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Los Angeles Center of Photography and the Whitney Museum of American Art; a number of his portraits of American poets are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. His literary work has been featured in Poets & Writers, The North American Review, Nowhere, the Los Angeles Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Southampton Review, Eclectica, The Night Heron Barks, Cutleaf, Hayden's Ferry Review, thimble, the Santa Clara Review and The Intrepid Times, among many others, and he is a frequent reviewer of poetry and photography titles for the New York Journal of Books. In photography he has been a finalist for the Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography, and is a Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation grant recipient, a two time Prix de la Photographie Paris award-winner, a New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Photography, and a winner of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences' Anthem Awards for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. For nonfiction he has been a finalist for the Travel Media Awards for feature writing and is a winner of the Lascaux Prize for Nonfiction, and for poetry he has been a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize and a winner of the Colonel Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards and a two-time winner of the Independent Book Publishers Awards gold medal.
