Terese Marie Mailhot graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with an M.F.A. in fiction. Mailhot’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Times, Carve Magazine, The Offing, The Toast, Yellow Medicine Review, and elsewhere. 

Greg Sarris is the author of Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts, Grand Avenue, Watermelon Night, most recently, the short story collection How the Mountain Was Made. Greg’s play “Mission Indians” opened at Intersection Theatre in San Francisco in February 2002. It went on to receive the 2003 Bay Area Theatre Critics Award for Best Script. Sarris is currently serving his thirteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, his tribe which was formerly known as the Federated Coast Miwok.

The most powerful and poetic memoir of 2018 has been written by Terese Marie Mailhot and raved about by some of our favorite writers, including Roxane Gay, Sherman Alexie, and Lidia Yuknavitch. One of the most important Native American writers working today, Greg Sarris, joins Mailhot for a conversation about what it truly means to be a Native American author today.

"Heart Berries is an epic take―an Iliad for the indigenous. It is the story of one First Nation woman and her geographic, emotional, and theological search for meaning in a colonial world. It is disturbing and hilarious. It contains sentences of such poetry and power that you will be compelled to set the book down and walk away to recover from the tremors." ―Sherman Alexie

“Stunning .... Neither an arid anthropological text nor another pseudo-Indian as-told-to fabrication. Instead, Sarris has breathed new life into these ancient Northern California tales and legends, lending them a subtle, light-hearted voice and vision.” ―Scott Lankford, Los Angeles Review of Books