Elissa Washuta
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Elissa Washuta is a Native American author from the Cowlitz people of Washington State. She has written two memoirs about her young adulthood, Starvation Mode: a Memoir of Food, Consumption and Control and My Body is a Book of Rules,[1] about her personal history with eating disorders and body dysmorphia.[2] She writes about sexual assault, mental health issues as a young adult, and struggling with her identity within the Indigenous community of the Pacific Northwest Coast.[3]
In 2019 Washuta was an assistant professor of English in the Creative Writing program at Ohio State University.[4]
Washuta's mother is an enrolled member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and she lived in the Columbia River Gorge region. Her parents met whilst they were at college in Seattle and they moved together to New Jersey.[5] Washuta graduated from high school in Hackettstown, New Jersey in 2003. According to the United States Census Bureau, her family were the only enrolled members of the Cowlitz tribe in her hometown.[6] The Cowlitz tribe had no reservation until 2015, when the federal government awarded it 152 acres near Ridgefield in Clark County, Washington.[7]
Washuta graduated summa cum laude from the University of Maryland in 2007[8] and earned a master's degree in Creative Writing with a distinction in Fiction Writing from the University of Washington in 2009.[9]