Leah Altman & Pam Houston

Join Leah Altman, author of Cekpa: A Memoir in Beaded Essays, and Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country and Cowboys Are My Weakness, for a reading and discussion.

For Leah Altman, growing up as an adoptee outside of her culture meant growing up without her cekpa, the Lakota connection to family and homeland. Now an adult, Leah departs her life in Portland, Oregon, to seek out her birth family and reconnect to her heritage—each chapter of her journey a bead in this literary cekpa crafted for her own children.

In this collection of personal essays dedicated to her two daughters, Altman masterfully weaves together her own literary cekpa in a coming-of-age story about transracial adoption, tribal enrollment, motherhood, and what it truly means to be connected to one’s culture, homeland, and family.

Leah Altman (Oglala Lakota) is a Native American transracial adoptee and second-generation Persian immigrant. She has worked as a freelance journalist and editor for over fifteen years, alongside her work in fundraising and grant writing for Native and BIPOC-led nonprofit organizations serving families and the environment. Leah lives in the Pacific Northwest and is an alum of the Institute of American Indian Arts and Portland State University’s Book Publishing program. Her work has been featured in publications such as Oregon Humanities, The Oregonian, Underscore, and Indian Country Today. She is an avid pool player, bead worker, fickle hiker, fair-weather kayaker, and mama bear of two young girls. She lives in Washington State.

Pam Houston is the author of the memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, as well as two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, two collections of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and the essay collection A Little More About Me. Houston teaches in the Creative Writing MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing MFA program, is a Professor of English at UC Davis, and cofounder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers. She lives at nine thousand feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.