Rain and Other Fictions: Stories by Maurice Kenny
EDITED BY
Marjorie Agosín
A collection of five short stories and a one-act play from American Book Award winner Maurice Kenny, the most distinguished figure in the renaissance that has occurred in American Indian poetry over the last three decades, bringing a poet's concern for precision and exactness in diction to his fiction (AbeBooks). These vignettes of a life spent on the road capture Kenny's Mohawk heritage and explore the value of tradition in contemporary society (BookScouter)—from a teenager searching for his father on a cross-country bus journey to Pueblo Indians dancing for rain while tourists gather.
Reviews
"The most distinguished figure in the renaissance that has occurred in American Indian poetry over the last three decades. He thus brings to his fiction a poet's concern for precision and exactness in diction."
—World Literature Today
Marjorie Agosín is a Chilean-American poet and scholar whose work focuses on social justice, feminism, and memory. Her publications include At the Threshold of Memory: New & Selected Poems (2003), The Light of Desire (2010), and I Lived on Butterfly Hill (2014), a young adult novel which won the Pura Belpre medal given by the American Library Association. She has received numerous honors and awards including a Jeanette Rankin Award in Human Rights, a United Nations Leadership Award for Human Rights, the Gabriela Mistral Medal of Honor from the Chilean government, and the Dr. Fritz Redlich Global Mental Health and Human Rights Award. She is the Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American studies and a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College.
Maurice Kenny was born in Watertown, New York on August 16, 1929 to parents of mixed ethnic heritage; his father, Anthony Andrew Kenny, was of both Mohawk and Irish ancestry, while his mother Doris Herrick Kenny, was both Seneca and English. He was raised in both Watertown and Bayonne, New Jersey, alongside two older sisters, Mary and Agnes. He left the North Country as a teenager, initially traveling to New York City and then matriculating at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he began his formal training as a poet and a scholar under Werner Beyer and Roy Marz, among others.
He began publishing his poetry in the early 1950s, with his first book – Dead Letters Sent – appearing in 1958. Over the course of the subsequent six decades, he brought more than thirty volumes of poetry, prose, fiction, and drama into the public eye. At the same time, in his roles as publisher, editor, and teacher, he mentored countless other writers at various stages of their development.