Janet Campbell Hale began her literary career with two poetry awards -- the Vincent Price Poetry Competition in 1963 and the New York Poetry Day Award in 1964 -- but her first major work, the novel The Owl's Song, was not published until 1974. Her single collection of poems, Custer Lives in Humboldt County and Other Poems, appeared in 1978. Her second novel, The Jailing of Cecelia Capture (1985), was nominated for many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. Hale received the American Book Award for Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter (1993), a personal chronicle in which she traces the effects of her Coeur d'Alene heritage on her present.

Janet Campbell was born on 11 January 1946 in Riverside, California, to Nicholas Patrick Campbell, a carpenter and full-blood Coeur d'Alene Indian, and Margaret Sullivan Campbell, a Kootenay with some white and Chippewa ancestry. Campbell is the Anglicized version of Cole-man-née, the name of...