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Mona Susan Power Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Mona Susan Power
photo by Ted Hall

Mona Susan Power

Mona Susan Power Biography

Mona Susan Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux nation. She is the author of four books of fiction: The Grass Dancer (winner of the 1995 PEN/Hemingway award), Roofwalker, Sacred Wilderness, and A Council of Dolls. Her fellowships include an Iowa Arts Fellowship, James Michener Fellowship, Radcliffe Bunting Institute Fellowship, Princeton Hodder Fellowship, USA Artists Fellowship, McKnight Fellowship, and Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship. Her short stories and essays have been widely published in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including: The Best American Short Stories of 1993, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Southern Review and Granta. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Mona Susan Power's website

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Interview

Mona Susan Power on the story behind A Council of Dolls

A Council of Dolls began as a short story project. I often write stories—this one meant to explore a childhood dream of becoming a ballerina like my idol, Maria Tallchief. I desperately wanted pointe shoes as a little girl, even though they're not safe for children younger than twelve and our family operated on a pinched budget. Some nights as I lay awake, I would pray and pray for the miracle of finding pink pointe shoes under the bed the next morning. I wholeheartedly believed that such glorious magic was possible! Of course, the shoes never materialized, but a fiction writer can manifest anything in our pages! So I outlined a story about a little girl very much like myself when I was seven years old, who has an emotionally distant mother. She shares her dream with the mother and is scolded for being so fanciful. Yet the next week, the girl wakes to find the beautiful shoes tucked beneath her bed, nestled in a crumpled box. The girl wonders whether the gift arrived via magic, or through the actions of her mother. I pulled out a notebook and began to write ... but as my hand moved across the page, the pointe shoes never made an appearance. Instead, there was Ethel, a chubby-cheeked adorable baby doll, the Black version of ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Mona Susan Power at BookBrowse
A Council of Dolls jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Mona Susan Power but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Lisa Bird-Wilson

    Lisa Bird-Wilson

    Lisa Bird-Wilson is a Cree-Métis writer and poet and the CEO of the Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies, an organization committed to the renewal and development of Métis culture and education. Her fiction ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    A Council of Dolls

    Try:
    Probably Ruby
    by Lisa Bird-Wilson

  • Rachel Eliza Griffiths

    Rachel Eliza Griffiths

    Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, visual artist, and novelist. She is a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a NAACP Image Award. Griffiths is also a ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    A Council of Dolls

    Try:
    Promise
    by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

We recommend 3 similar authors

View all 3 Read-Alikes

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Top Picks

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    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
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    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
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    The Women
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    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

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Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
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