Tanaya Winder is a poet, writer, educator, and motivational speaker from the Southern Ute, Duckwater Shoshone, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Nations. She grew up on the Southern Ute Indian reservation and attended college at Stanford University where she earned a BA in English. After college, she pursued her passion of poetry and received her graduate degree a MFA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico. Since then she has co-founded As/Us: A Space for Women of the World, a literary magazine publishing works by Indigenous women and women of color.

A winner of the 2010 A Room Of Her Own Foundation’s Orlando prize in poetry, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Superstition Review, Drunkenboat, Kweli, and Bellevue Literary Review 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. West End Press recently published her debut poetry collection Words Like Love. She writes about her travels and journey from her blog Letters From A Young Poet where you can read more of her work. She teaches as an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico in the Chican@ Studies Program.