Esther G. Belin, a writer and multi-media artist, is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and lives in southwest Colorado. She is a second-generation off-reservation Native American, a by-product of the U.S. federal Indian policies of termination and relocation. Her art and writing reflect the historical trauma from those policies as well as the philosophy of Saah Naaghái Bik’eh Hózho, the worldview of the Navajo people. Belin’s writing is widely anthologized and her latest volume of poetry, Of Cartography, examines identity politics, checkerboard land status, and the interplay of words (abstraction) and image (realism). In 200, she won the American Book Award for her first book of poetry, From the Belly of My Beauty. She holds degrees from Antioch University, the Institute of American Indian Arts and the University of California at Berkeley.
