2023 One Maryland One Book Author Events

Isabel Quintana Wulf, Ph.D.
Department of English
Director of American Studies
Salisbury University

Isabel Quintana Wulf an Assistant Professor in the Department of English as a Multiethnic US Literatures specialist, and the Director of the American Studies Program. She teaches courses in Multiethnic US Literatures, Latina/o/x Literature, Native American Literature, Asian American Literature, and Critical Theory. Quintana Wulf earned her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013, and her scholarship engages with questions of borders (both geopolitical and metaphorical), inclusion and exclusion, national and cultural identity, and processes of racialization in contemporary multiethnic US literatures—especially in Native and Latina/o/x literary texts. Born and raised in Spain to a Spanish father and a German mother, Quintana Wulf has been in the US for 21 years and has been a naturalized US citizen since 2016.

Dr. Carayon joined the faculty at Salisbury University in 2012. She specializes in the history of the American colonies, Native American history, and the French Atlantic world (16th-18th century). In addition to these topics, she also teaches the History “proseminar” as well as the Master’s program’s Methods course. She holds a Master’s degree from the Universite Paul Valery in Montpellier (France) and a Ph.D. in American History from the College of William and Mary (’10). Her first book, Eloquence Embodied : Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas was published in the Fall 2019 by the University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC) and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg, VA) (
https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469652627/eloquence-embodied/ ). The monograph has since received several prizes.

(Diné) is a fiction writer, poet, educator, and former chef, born in Alaska and raised in Northern Arizona. He received his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and a BA in Liberal Arts from The Evergreen State College. His work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Santa Fe Literary Review, Yellow Medicine Review, and Juked, among other publications. He is a recipient of Poetry Northwest’s inaugural James Welch Prize for Indigenous writers, the Ucross Foundation’s first Fellowship for Native American Writers, and fellowships from the Truman Capote Literary Trust, Tin House, and Writing By Writers. Basham lives in Baltimore, where he runs a make-believe café with his wife and dog.

Playing brilliantly with form and narrative, Swim Home to the Vanished by Brendan Shay Basham (Harper; On sale: August 22, 2023) is a literary feat that embraces and builds on indigenous storytelling traditions—a poetic, hallucinatory, fever-dream of a book that will excite readers. New York Times bestselling writer Tommy Orange writes that “Swim Home to the Vanished is a lush and fantastic journey through strange lands and minds from an incandescent new voice full of my kind of melancholic brilliance and unromantic magic. The book devastates buoyantly, sensually, like some culinary chimera rising from heretofore unknown waters to take you under and wrap you like a song. Brendan Basham’s novel is the announcement of an emerging writer fully formed.”

After the death of his brother, Damien, a grief-stricken young man, seeks refuge and oblivion in a secluded fishing village dominated by a family of brujas in this haunting debut novel, inspired, in part, by the ramifications of Diné history and thought—a mesmerizing, original tale in the tradition of works by Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and Gabriel García Márquez.

But the village has grief of its own. The same day that Damien arrives, a young woman from the community’s most powerful family is being laid to rest. A stranger in town, Damien is the object of gossip and suspicion, ignored by all except the dead girl’s mother, Ana Maria. Damien soon begins to fall under Ana Maria’s charismatic spell. But it becomes impossible for him to resist the rumors that she might have had something to do with her daughter’s death, or to deny his strange kinship with one of Ana Maria’s surviving daughters, Marta, who knows too well the grief that follows the loss of a sibling and is driven by a fierce need for revenge. Swiftly, Damien finds himself caught in a power struggle between the brujas, a whirlwind battle that threatens to sweep the whole village out to sea.

Honoring the traditions and history of the Diné people, including the belief that those who grieve can take on the bodies of animals, Swim Home to the Vanished explores the death grip grief has on the human soul, the ripples and variations it casts over the texture of life. It interrogates the condition the Navajo call Che’naa’: a feeling of missing something that you can no longer go back to, or perhaps never existed at all, carried by all sufferers of the Long Walk, a sort of psychological, forced removal that spans time and space.

Brendan Shay Basham’s work has already received major attention. He’s been widely published in many prominent literary magazines and has received several prizes and fellowships, including nominations for the 2016 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and a 2018 Pushcart Prize.