Gladys Cardiff

THE PATH FROM EVERY DIRECTION: Starting the 2006/2006 Performing Arts and Presidential Speaker Series is Gladys Cardiff - A Cherokee Nation member who celebrates her cultural heritage through peotry. Gladys Cardiff is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee and a member of the Native Writer's Circle of the Americas. Her poems have appeared in periodicals and anthologies for some twenty years, including essential gatherings of Native American poetry such as Carriers of the Dream Wheel, From the Belly of the Shark, Songs from this Earth on Turtle's Back, That's What She Said, Harpers Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry, and Reinventing the Enemy's Language. She has written two books, A Bare Unpainted Table and To Frighten a Storm, which won the Washington State Governor's First Book Award in 1976. Cardiff's mother was Irish and Welsh and her father was a member of the Owl clan of the North Carolina Cherokee. Cardiff grew up in Seattle, Washington, and she rec