Jay Jordan Hawke

Jay Jordan Hawke writes youth fiction about identity, belonging, and Indigenous heritage. Pukawiss The Outcast begins the Two-Spirit Chronicles with Joshua, a teenager sent to live with his Ojibwe grandfather in Wisconsin. Life near a recreated sixteenth-century village reconnects him with traditions his strict upbringing had kept distant. The story of Pukawiss, a manitou associated with dance and a nontraditional life, helps Joshua understand his own place within family and community. Harmony Ink Press issued it in 2014, and it became a 2015 Lambda Literary Award finalist in the children's and youth category. Hawke continued the sequence with A Scout is Brave and Onwaachige the Dreamer, while an interview identifies the related Coyote's Many Faces as a standalone prequel. Across the series, folklore and contemporary adolescence meet through characters learning how inherited stories can offer language for present experience.