Winner of the 2011 PEN Oakland - Josephine Miles National Literary Award for poetry

Red Willow People is like sacred text from the great spirit, great mother earth, wisdom beyond knowing, Holy Writ. As Cynthia Hogue, author of The Incognito Body, and Or Consequence, writes:
"One enters Devreaux Baker's haunting new collection, Red Willow People, as one would sacred terrain. These poems are spare, tactile and textured, but they hover between worlds: 'I do not know why the ghost of the woman from the pueblo / visits me,' one speaker confesses. This visitation is a gift, but it carries with it the task of journeying to that 'core place / where bone meets spirit,' 'the other side of air,' through time and 'beyond knowing.' Red Willow People is a book of visionary medicine, for though Baker walks through 'the thin field / of grief,' she does so to instruct and heal, walking in a rare beauty and in magic to write these gorgeously wise poems."