American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays

by Diane Glancy

In American Gypsy, a collection of six plays, Diane Glancy uses a mélange of voices to invoke the myths and realities of modern Native American life. Glancy intermixes poetry and prose to address themes of gender, generational relationships, acculturation, myth, and tensions between Christianity and traditional Native American belief systems.

The six plays included, “The Woman Who Was a Red Deer Dressed for the Deer Dance,” “The Women Who Loved House Trailers,” “American Gypsy,” “Jump Kiss,” “Lesser Wars,” and “The Toad (Another Name for the Moon) Should Have a Bite,” run the gamut from monologues to multi-character pieces and vary in length from fifteen minutes to over an hour. Glancy concludes the collection with a thought-provoking essay on Native American playwriting.

Genres: Plays, Native American

234 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2002

About the author

(Helen) Diane Glancy is a Cherokee poet, author and playwright.

Glancy was born in 1941 in Kansas City, Missouri. She received her Bachelor of Arts (English literature) from the University of Missouri in 1964, then later continued her education at the University of Central Oklahoma, earning her a Masters degree in English in 1983. In 1988, she received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa.

Glancy is an English professor and began teaching in 1989 at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, teaching Native American literature and creative writing courses. Glancy's literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written. I found this book in the discard pile at school and then wrote a paper about it that got me into grad school.