Tanaya Winder (Girl on Fire) is a writer, educator, motivational speaker, and performance poet from the Southern Ute, Duckwater Shoshone, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Nations. She grew up on the Southern Ute Indian reservation and attended college at Stanford University where she earned a BA in English and the University of New Mexico where she received an MFA in creative writing. Since then she has co-founded As/Us: A Space for Women of the World and founded Dream Warriors, an Indigenous artist management company. Tanaya is the Director of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Upward Bound program which serves approximately 103 Native American high school youth from 8 reservations. She is an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico in the Chicano and Chicana Studies program. She guest lectures, teaches creative writing workshops, and speaks at high schools, universities, and communities internationally. Tanaya writes and teaches about different expressions of love (self love, intimate love, social love, community love, and universal love); she is an advocate of heartwork and believes everyone has a gift they’ve been placed on this earth to share.