Eric Gansworth, a writer and visual artist, is an enrolled member of the Onondaga Nation. Currently, he is a Professor of English and Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. His books include the novels, Mending Skins (PEN Oakland Award) and Extra Indians (American Book Award), and the collection of poems and paintings, A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function . His work in theater has had exposure at the Public Theater, in New York City, the Goodrich Theater, at SUNY Oneonta, and the Freed Center at Northern Ohio University.
As a visual artist, he has had solo exhibitions at the Castellani Museum, Colgate University, Bright Hill Center, Westfield State University, and the Project Space Gallery at SUNY Oneonta, among other places.
His work has appeared in the journals The Kenyon Review, The Cream City Review, The Boston Review, Provincetown Arts, Shenandoah, and has been supported by the National Book Critics Circle, The Saltonstall Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities and The Seaside Institute.
Eric Gansworth, a writer and visual artist, is an enrolled member of the Onondaga Nation. He was raised at the Tuscarora Nation, near Niagara Falls, New York. Currently, he is a Professor of English and Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York.
His novels, Indian Summers (Michigan State University Press 1998), Smoke Dancing (MSUP 2004), Mending Skins (University of Nebraska Press 2005), Extra Indians (Milkweed Editions, 2010), the collections of poems, Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon (MSUP 2000) and A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function , (Syracuse University Press 2008), and Breathing the Monster Alive , (Bright Hill) poems, personal essays, all feature paintings as integral parts of their narratives. His first full length performance/play, Re-Creation Story, premiered as a staged reading in 2008’s Native Theater Festival at the Public Theater in New York City. Theater commissions, Home Fires and Reservation Roads, (a performance), premiered at the State University of New York at Oneonta, and Rabbit Dance, at Ohio Northern University, both in 2011. From the Western Door to the Lower West Side , (White Pine, 2009) is a volume of poems in response to images by social documentary photographer, Milton Rogovin. An anthology he edited, Sovereign Bones (Nation Books, 2007), focused on Creative Non-fiction from Indigenous writers and artists exploring the link between art and cultural survival.
Gansworth is also a visual artist. His first solo exhibit, “Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon,” opened in 1999 at the Olean Public Library and an expanded show opened at the Castellani Museum in 2000. A solo exhibit, “Breathing the Monster Alive” opened at Bright Hill Center in 2006. A collaborative two-artist show, “Feedback,” with sculptor Larry Plant, opened in 2005 at the Stuyvessant Gallery in Buffalo, NY. A new solo exhibit, “Cross-PolliNation,” opened at the Vogt Gallery at Canisius College in 2008, and was mounted with some variation, at Colgate University in late 2009, as “A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function.” An exhibit titled “Two Rows: A Balancing Act,” ran at Westfield State University, in Massachusetts, in 2010. “Home Fires and Reservation Roads,” a career retrospective exhibit, coinciding with a performance residency, was mounted at the State University of New York at Oneonta’s Project Space Gallery in 2011.
Gansworth’s visual work has been in group shows across New York State, including: “Revisiting Turtle Island,” at the Niagara Arts and Culture Center, “Native Vision: Art through Haudenosaunee Eyes,” at the Fanette-Goldman Gallery, "Art Creations from Tuscarora," at Neto Hatinakwe Ohnkwehowe, the "Keepers of the Western Door" Exhibit, co-sponsored by CEPA Gallery and the World University Games, and in a follow-up exhibit "In the Shadow of the Eagle," at the Castellani Museum; in "Teaching Metaphors" at the Niagara County Community College; and in "Sharing the Visions," at Hartwick College in Oneonta.
One of his paintings was the cover of Sherman Alexie's book First Indian on the Moon. Others have been included in the history text As Long as the Grass Shall Grow and Rivers Flow (Harcourt Brace) the art history text Pictures and Power: Haudenosaunee and Iroquoian Paintings and Visual Representation, A.D. 166-2004 (University of Oklahoma Press), the Iroquois Voices, Iroquois Visions anthology (Bright Hill), and the journal, The Cream City Review. In 2006, the Office of Multicultural Affairs at Canisius College commissioned a painting from Gansworth, “From One Dance, Creation,” which is now permanently on display in the campus’s Bouwhuis Library.
He served 11 years on the Board of Directors of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and has served terms on panels for the Arts Council of Buffalo and Erie County and the New York State Council on the Arts Literature Panel, and on the Artists Advisory Committee for the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Administration for Native Americans. He was also an artist in the Herd About Buffalo Project.
Work of his, fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and visual art, has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals, The Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, Third Coast, Blueline, Stone Canoe, Cold Mountain Review, Many Mountains Moving, FICTION, Poetry International, Sentence, New York Quarterly, Superstition Review, Provincetown Arts, Short Story, Yellow Medicine Review, Shenandoah, The Cream City Review, Slipstream, phati'tude, UCLA's American Indian Culture and Research Journal and American Indian Quarterly, in the anthologies, Growing Up Native American (Morrow); Blue Dawn, Red Earth (Doubleday); American Tensions (New Village Press); Ownership (Imagination & Place Press); A Usable Past (University of Bordeaux Press, France); Iroquois Voices, Iroquois Visions (Bright Hill); The Second Word Thursdays Anthology (Bright Hill); Stories for Winter Nights (White Pine); Fishing for Chickens (Persea); Genocide of the Mind (The Nation Books); Eating Fire, Tasting Blood (Thunder’s Mouth); Children of the Dragonfly (University of Arizona Press) and Nothing but the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature(Prentice Hall), on Roadkillbasa, a performance audio tape and in Quartet, a just buffalo literary center, inc. chapbook.
Extra Indians was the recipient of an American Book Award in 2011, A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function was voted to the number 3 position on the National Book Critics Circle “Good Reads” List in the Poetry Category for Spring 2008, and Mending Skins won a PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles National Literary Award in 2006. Extra Indians was also selected for a Community Reads program, through the College of Menominee Nation, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Gansworth was invited to write the entry for American Indian Literature in the Encyclopedia of New York State. He is a member of the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers & Storytellers, the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, is listed in the Directory of American Poets & Fiction Writers and has received Writer-in-Residence awards from, The Associated Colleges of the Twin Cities, just buffalo literary center, inc. as well as at his home institution, Canisius College. He was also awarded an Artist’s Residency at the Seaside Institute, in Seaside, Florida and has received a Special Opportunities Stipend Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts and an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation. In 2008, he was a keynote speaker at the Native American Literature Symposium.
Gansworth's work is a commentary on the oral tradition existing within Haudenosaunee culture and its fluid nature. He uses iconography recognizable in the context of the mythic Haudenosaunee world, yet alters it to reflect issues relevant to a more contemporary Haudenosaunee existence.
Gansworth’s books have been adopted for courses at the following institutions:
Buffalo State College; Colgate University; College of Menominee Nation; the College of St. Catherine; College of St. Rose; Hamilton College; Hartwick College; Jamestown Community College; Kenyon College; Institute of American Indian Arts; Macalester College; McMaster University; Michigan State University; Minnesota State University Mankato; North Country Community College; Purdue University; St. Thomas University; State University of New York(SUNY) Fredonia; SUNY Cortland; SUNY Oneonta; SUNY Potsdam; SUNY New Paltz; University of Minnesota Morris; University of Wisconsin Madison; Washington State University; Western Washington University; University of Denver; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Westfield State University; University of Kent, Canterbury; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Yale University.
My_Good_Man.pdf
True_Crime.pdf
Trick_or_Treat.pdf
Night_in_the_Ruts.pdf
Patriot_Act.pdf
My_Mother_Delivers.pdf
My_Cousins_Wife.pdf
Summons.pdf
Beams_Uncle.pdf
Indian_Picnic.pdf
Millenium_Park.pdf
American_Heritage.pdf
Dawn_to_Dickey.pdf
A full length play set in Niagara Falls and one of the bridges in our territories that connects the land masses commonly defined as the United States and Canada. Its characters lives explore Haudenosaunee identity and the borders we define for ourselves, culturally and politically, in the form of treaties, as well as those borders whose definitions are forced on us in our territories in a Post September Eleventh word.
Patriot Act had its first staged reading in the Identity Play Series at SUNY Oneonta in February 2011, featuring Grammy winning Oneida singer-songwriter, Joanne Shenandoah, in the lead role.
Link to coverage in the Oneonta State Times
A multi-media performance, including monologue, memory play, actors, musicians, projections, animation, visual art and photography. This autobiographical piece on the nature of generational and cultural memory, is shaped around conflicted memories of a family homestead and the lives lived within its walls. The narrative, in vignettes, are told in monologue and fleshed out by actors dramatizing key scenes. Home Fires and Reservation Roads, directed by Drew Kahl, was first performed in the Goodrich Theater on the campus of SUNY Oneonta during April 2011, the culmination of a residency sponsored by a SUNY Diversity Grant.
A multi-media performance, including monologue, memory play, actors, projections, video, visual art and photography. This fragmentary autobiographical piece explores the central relationship contemporary Haudenosaunee communities have with their cosmology. The individual responsibility for the story and the cultural riches it gives in return are counterbalanced with one another.
Re-Creation Story received an augmented staged reading at The Public Theater in New York City, during its Second Native Theater Festival in November 2008. The production was directed by Leigh Silverman with dramaturgy by Liz Frankel, and featured Billy Merasty, Monique Mojica, Michelle St. John, Dylan Carusona, Joe Cross, Kim Rosen, and Avia Bushyhead.
Re-Creation Story:
Festival Overview
Review
Interview with Eric Gansworth conducted by Tom Pearson
Re-Creation Story is available for reading, but not licensing for production at Alexendar Street Press (fee-based) online database of North American Indian Drama
Rabbit Dance is a one act play, commissioned by Ohio Northern University for their Ninth Annual International Play Festival. It premiered in April 2011, at the Freed Center, on the Ohio Northern campus in Ada, Ohio. The play explores issues of treaty rights, stereotypes, and generational domestic violence in a single encounter two Haudenosaunee beadworkers, at their Niagara Falls State Park vendors tables have, with two white teenagers from the city of Niagara Falls, just before Memorial Day weekend. Rabbit Dance was produced by Nils Riess, directed by Steve Elm, with dramaturgy by Joan Robbins. The cast consisted of Actors Equity performers Monique Mojica and Kateri Walker, and two student actors from the ONU theater program, Hayley Reynolds and Drew Knigga.
Coverage of the International Play Festival in the Toldeo Blade
Coverage of the International PLay Festival from Ohio Northern University Public Relations
- link 1
- link 2
Reviews/Critical Articles
Link to an essay I wrote, suggesting ways to develop an effective set of materials for a successful reading of your own work, for the New York State Council on the Arts Literature Technical Assistance Program
Link to Poetry Daily for Christopher Teutons review in The Kenyon Review
Link to an excerpt from Mending Skins at the University of Nebraska Press site
Link to The Public Theaters Online Journal for the Native Theater Festival including transcripts of discussions and interviews, including coverage of Erics play, Re-Creation Story.
Link to Susan Bernardins critical essay: As Long as the Hair Shall Grow: Survivance in Eric Gansworths Reservation Fictions in the anthology, Survivance, edited by Gerald Vizenor (University of Nebraska Press, 2008)
Link to Picturing America Series for Public Libraries, 2010,for which the novel, Mending Skins, was chosen
Profile about Niagara County Community College's Distinguished Alumni Award
Interview Conducted at the State University of New York at Oneonta
Video Link to perhaps the most surreal response to any of my work: an anonymous analysis of SMOKE DANCING, performed by paper puppets.
(be warned, the song may stick in your head, the way Its a Small World, After All does, once youve been foolish enough to get on that ride at Disney World: (Kudos to the anonymous students who went to these strange labors!)
For high-resolution copies of the images contained in this site, please use the Contact link above to submit a request.
Eric_Gansworth_vita.pdf
As Long as the Hair Shall Grow.pdf
Selected Links to share
www.tleavesbooks.com
www.birchbarkbooks.com
http://midnightrecords.com/Joomla/
http://www.recordtheatre.com/
