Greg Sarris has gone from college athlete to creative writer, from street tough to academic, from undergraduate English major to professor of American Indian studies. He is generating some of the most talked-about interdisciplinary and cross-cultural scholarship in the country. He has written a classic biography of a California Indian woman, the last Cache Creek Pomo Basket Maker and healing dreamer; he is writing fiction about growing up with off-reservation Indians and turning that fiction into screenplays for television and film. Along with Sherman Alexie, Gordon Henry, and Debra Earling, Sarris is in the advance guard of a second wave of multifaceted Indian artists and intellectuals who are carrying on a Native American renaissance.

Sarris was born on 12 February 1952 in Santa Rosa, California. His Miwok-Pomo-Filipino father, Emilio "Meatloaf" Hilario, who had played football for the University of Southern California, eventually drank himself to death; his mother, Bunny Hartman...