Craig Womack

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Craig Womack is a lecturer in Native American Studies. Creek-Cherokee by ancestry, Womack is best known for Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, a book of literary criticism which argues that the dominant approach to academic study of Native American literature is incorrect. Instead of using poststructural and postcolonial approaches that do not have their basis in Native culture or experience, Womack claims the work of the Native critic should be to develop tribal models of criticism. Along with Robert Allen Warrior, Jace Weaver and Greg Sarris, Womack is seen as a second-generation Native American literary scholar, a group that have significantly altered the critical metholodogies used to approach Native American literature.

Review: Womack has produced a groundbreaking literary work. It is a stunning model of how Indian scholars can explicate tribal-specific oral and written works with an understanding of the political ramifications for real Indian peoples. Womack convincingly and clearly explains how contemporary literary theories are inadequate and colonial for American Indian literatures. His application of tribal-based criticism is brilliant. From University of Minnesota Press [1].

Womack has also produced a novel, Drowning in Fire, about the lives of young gay Native Americans.