Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California. Her book Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Heyday Books, 2013), received the PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Association, and was short-listed for the William Saroyan Literary Award. This mixed-genre book traces her family into, through, and out of the Carmel Mission from 1770-2013, using oral histories, mission records, family photographs, newspaper records, ethnographic field notes, and more. For the past 15 years, Miranda has been Professor and recent John Lucian Smith Jr. Endowed Chair of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia where she teaches literature of the margins and creative writing.