Terra Trevor, author of We Who Walk the Seven Ways: A Memoir (Nebraska, 2023) will speak at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley. The festival takes place from May 31-June 1, 2025.

Trevor will participate in the panel “Living Legacies: Native Authors on Memoir and Memory” alongside authors Jennifer Foerster and Chris La Tray. The panel will be moderated by Denise Low, author of The Turtle’s Beating Heart (Bison Books, 2017). The panel is on Sunday, June 1, from 4:00-4:45 p.m. PDT in the Brown Center Goldman Theater.

From the very first contact, Indigenous people have been spoken about more than they have been heard. Early “autobiographies” of Native individuals were often penned by outsiders, distorting the essence of the genre by denying autonomy to the very subjects for whom autobiography—by definition—should uplift. In recent years, seminal works of First Nations storytelling have come to the forefront, and this panel features three recent additions to the Native voices now taking center stage to tell their own stories. The event is free and open to the public.

We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty.

With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every end is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.