In the Presence of the Sun

N. Scott Momaday was born in 1934 in Lawton, in southwestern Oklahoma, to a Kiowa father and Cherokee mixed-blood mother. In his lifetime, he has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for House Made of Dawn, and election into the Kiowa Gourd Clan. In a ceremony at the White House in 2007, Momaday was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Momaday resides in Santa Fe.

"In the Presence of the Sun presents 30 years of selected works by [N. Scott] Momaday, the well-known Southwest Native American novelist. His unadorned poetry, which recounts fables and rituals of the Kiowa nation, conveys the deep sense of place of the Native American oral tradition. Here are dream-songs about animals (bear, bison, terrapin) and life away from urban alienation, an imagined re-creation based on Billy the Kid, prose poems about Plains Shields (and a fascinating discussion of their background), and new poems that utilize primary colors ('forms of the earth') to express instinctive continuities of a pre-Columbian vision." - Library Journal "The strong, spare beauty of In the Presence of the Sun is compelling evidence that Scott Momaday is one of the most versatile and distinguished artists in America today." - Peter Matthiessen ".. the images, the voices, the people are shadowy, elusive, burning with invention, like flames against a dark sky. For behind them is always the artist-author himself... a man with a sacred investiture. Strong medicine, strong art indeed." - The New York Times Book Review"