Author Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez: “A Light to Do Shellwork By”
Coastal Band member Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez is a cherished cultural leader, storyteller, and educator who released her new book entitled A Light to Do Shellwork By: Poems, earning a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2022 Award. Known lovingly as Auntie Georgie, she’s a guiding light in many Native communities—a source of wisdom, warmth, and enduring love.
For 27 years, Georgiana taught at Cal State Long Beach, where she co-created powerful courses such as “World Genocide: An American Indian Perspective” and “Conduits of Californian Indian Cultures.” She has served as a board member for the California Indian Storytelling Association and continues to advocate for Indigenous languages and sacred sites.
Her storytelling is medicine—both literary and lived. Her poem “I Saw My Father Today” is permanently displayed in San Francisco’s Embarcadero Muni/BART station, a testament to her power as a writer and cultural voice.
“She’s a gifted storyteller… reminding us how to return home to ourselves and each other—with love, without judgment, and always with beauty.”
— Luhui Isha Waiya, Associate Director, Wishtoyo Foundation"A Light to Do Shellwork By casts a luminous and rare spiritual history on the borders of one woman's belonging. Georgiana's poems hold light from the voice of ancestors and reveal her own place in the line of their history. Like her father, an exquisite carver, she uses her power with words to inscribe her own origins from Indigenous ocean people as well as the desert nations who travel west in their song journey for salt. She sings a new passage, a shining connection of present with past and by the light of her words, this writer also delineates another truth of colonial history."
— Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), author of Dark. Sweet.: New & Selected Poems
"Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez's poems hold out their hands and welcome me home. Home to a father's lined face, hands patting dark soil, salt wind off the ocean, scent of mountains. Home to dogs living under the porch, holy starlight, and fires tended on the far shore of our dreaming, waiting for us to make that long swim to the other side. These are poems in the voice of a contemporary Chumash woman whose songs rise above genocide and reach back in time to the strength of ancestors; her vision urges us toward an inland sea filled with blossoms and seashells. Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez's work is a quiet beacon of tenderness and hope for us to follow in difficult times."
— Deborah A. Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen and Chumash), author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir
Whether around a sacred fire or at a kitchen table, Georgiana’s presence is a blessing—offering light, healing, and a way home.
