Tanaya Winder

Tanaya Winder is a poet, writer, and educator, raised on the Southern Ute Reservation in Ignacio, CO. An enrolled member of the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe, her background includes Southern Ute, Pyramid Lake Paiute, Navajo, and Black heritages. Tanaya writes and teaches about different expressions of love (self love, intimate love, social love, community love, and universal love). A winner of the 2010 A Room Of Her Own Foundation’s Orlando Prize in Poetry, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cutthroat magazine, Superstition Review, Drunkenboat and Kweli among others. Her poems from her manuscript “Love in a Time of Blood Quantum” were produced and performed by the Poetic Theater Productions Presents Company in NYC.

Her debut poetry collection "Words Like Love" was published in 2015 by West End Press. Tanaya has taught writing courses at Stanford University, UC-Boulder, and the University of New Mexico. She has a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA in creative writing from UNM. She is a co-founder and editor-in-chief of As/Us: A Space for Women of the World. She guest lectures and teaches creative writing workshops at high schools and universities internationally. Tanaya is the Director of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Upward Bound Program, which services 103 Native American youth from 8 states, 22 high schools, and 8 reservations across the country. She continues to teach as an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico. Finally, she created Dream Warriors Management, an Indigenous artist management company and collective.