He has edited a number of highly praised anthologies of contemporary poetry and fiction, including Songs from this Earth on Turtle's Back, Breaking Silence (winner of an American Book Award) and Returning the Gift. With his wife, Carol, he is the founder and Co-Director of the Greenfield Review Literary Center and The Greenfield Review Press. His work as a educator includes eight years of directing a college program for Skidmore College inside a maximum security prison. in Comparative Literature from the Union Institute of Ohio. in Literature and Creative Writing from Syracuse and a Ph.D. He, his younger sister Margaret, and his two grown sons, James and Jesse, continue to work extensively in projects involving the preservation of Abenaki culture, language and traditional Native skills, including performing traditional and contemporary Abenaki music with the Dawnland Singers. Although his American Indian heritage is only one part of an ethnic background that includes Slovak and English blood, those Native roots are the ones by which he has been most nourished. Much of his writing draws on that land and his Abenaki ancestry. Joseph Bruchac lives with his wife, Carol, in the Adirondack mountain foothills town of Greenfield Center, New York, in the same house where his maternal grandparents raised him. With their community and caring for one another, Malian and her family will survive this pandemic, too. Malian hears stories from her grandparents about how it has always been this way in their community: Stories about their ancestors, who survived epidemics of European diseases about her grandfather, who survived a terrible government boarding school and about Malian's own mother, who survived and returned to her Native community after social services took her away to live in foster care as a child.

Everyone is worried about the pandemic, but on the reservation, everyone protects each other, from Malian caring for her grandparents to the local dog, Malsum, guarding their house. Now she's staying there, away from her parents and her school in Boston. Malian was visiting her grandparents on the reservation when the COVID-19 pandemic started. From the U.S.'s foremost indigenous children's author comes a middle grade verse novel set during the COVID-19 pandemic, about a Wabanaki girl's quarantine on her grandparents' reservation and the local dog that becomes her best friend

Rez Dogs by Joseph Bruchac