Cook-Lynn’s books include The Politics of Hallowed Ground: Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty (with Mario Gonzalez, University of Illinois Press) and Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (University of Wisconsin Press).
Most recently, she published Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Sun Tracks) and A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations (Texas Tech).
Winner in 2009 of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Cook-Lynn did doctoral work at the University of Nebraska and was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at Stanford University in 1976.
Professor Emerita of English and Native American Studies at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington, Cook-Lynn was born in 1930 in Fort Thompson, South Dakota, and reared on the reservation. She descends from a family of Sioux politicians—her father and grandfather served on the Crow Creek Sioux Tribal Council for many years—and from Native scholars. Her grandmother was a bilingual writer for early Christian-oriented newspapers at Sisseton, SD, and a great-grandfather, Gabriel Renville, was a Native linguist instrumental in developing early Dacotah language dictionaries.
Since retirement, Cook-Lynn has served as a writer-in-residence at universities around the country. In the fall of 1993, she and N. Scott Momaday held a workshop at South Dakota State University for Sioux writers. From it emerged a journal, Woyake Kinikiya: A Tribal Model Literary Journal, introduced by six of Cook-Lynn's poems. Her writing and teaching center on the cultural, historical, and political survival of Indian Nations.
Copies of Cook-Lynn’s books will be available for purchase and the HSU Bookstore will host a book-signing at her October 25 public lecture.