Lisa Brooks is an Abenaki writer and scholar – her father’s family is from the upper Missisquoi River (in northern Vermont) and the Pemigewasset River (in northern New Hampshire). Her mother’s family is from Koszarawa, Poland. She currently lives in southern New Hampshire with her daughter and her husband, nearby her extended family. Brooks is an Assistant Professor of History and Literature and of Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, where she teaches courses in Native American literature, with an emphasis on historical, political, and geographic contexts. She also serves on the Faculty Advisory Board of the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP). As a young woman, she worked in the tribal office of the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi, on aboriginal rights and land preservation cases, including the protection of the “Grandma Lampman’s” site. She later received her Ph.D. in English, with a minor in American Indian Studies, from Cornell University in 2004. Her recently published book The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (University of Minnesota Press 2008) focuses on the role of writing as a tool of social reconstruction and land reclamation in the Native networks of the northeast. She also co-authored the collaborative volume, Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (2008), and wrote the “Afterword” for American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006). She serves on the Editorial Board of Studies in American Indian Literatures, the Native American Advisory Board of the Boston Children’s Museum, as an in-kind advisor to the Abenaki-UVM-SRS Child Welfare Training Project, and on the Advisory Board of Gedakina, a non-profit organization focused on indigenous cultural revitalization, educational outreach, and community wellness in northern New England.