Heather Cahoon, PhD, is an award-winning poet and scholar of federal Indian policy. She grew up on the Flathead Reservation and is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Montana, where she was the Richard Hugo Scholar.
Heather has also been awarded a Potlatch Fund Native Arts grant and a Montana Arts Council Artist Innovation Award for her writing. Her chapbook Elk Thirst won the Merriam Frontier Prize, and her book Horsefly Dress was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2020.
She is an associate professor of Tribal Governance and Policy at the University of Montana, where she also founded the American Indian Governance and Policy Institute.