Stan Rushworth was born in 1944 and raised on the banks of the Stanislaus River in the East San Joaquin Valley in California by his grandfather, who was of Cherokee descent. He has taught Native American Literature at Cabrillo College, in Aptos, California for the last twenty-eight years, including similar work at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a lecturer, and worked for eighteen years at Cabrillo’s Watsonville Center teaching basic skills and critical thinking surrounding Indigenous peoples’ issues, including six years as Director/Instructor of the Puente Program, centered in the Chicano community. He authored 'Sam Woods: American Healing' (Station Hill Press, New York) in 1992, and 'Going to Water: The Journal of Beginning Rain' (Talking Leaves Press, Freedom, CA) in 2014. As a tenured faculty emeritus, he currently teaches Native American Literature at Cabrillo College, and works as an activist and advocate for Indigenous people as a teacher, writer and speaker. He is an enrolled citizen of the Chiricahua Apache Nation, and is also a member of the Santa Cruz Indian Council, where he is an Advising Cultural Elder. He is currently the Attending Elder (school year 19-20) for the American Indian Resource Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is married, with two sons and one grandson.
My name is Patrick Farnsworth. I’m a long-form interviewer, occasional writer, and host of Last Born In The Wilderness, a podcast I’ve produced for the better part of five years.
