Trace DeMeyer

Trace L. Hentz is an American multi-genre author, artist, poet, and journalist of Shawnee and Cherokee descent. Her writing is mainly focused on Native Americans and Native American adoption issues.

Name Trace Lara Hentz has also been known as Trace A. DeMeyer, Tracy Ann DeMeyer, and Laura Jean Thrall-Bland.

Biography Hentz began investigating her adoption at the age of 22, which was one of many that stemmed from the Indian Adoption Projects. She was able to open her sealed adoption records, and with the information she found in her adoption file, Hentz spent the next 27 years looking for and connecting with her biological relatives.

Her memoir, One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects, chronicles the story of her adoption, and comments on both the history of the adoption of Native American children and its effect on those who were adopted. Hentz is an advocate for other Native American adoptees who are trying to discover their heritage. Her advocacy led to her and fellow adoptee Patricia Busbee compiling many Native American adoptee stories into the anthology Two Worlds: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects.

Hentz's past has influenced her career, leading her to write for, and about, Native American tribes across the country. Hentz interviewed political prisoner Leonard Peltier in 1998, while he was still a prisoner in Leavenworth, a federal prison. Pequot Times and Sawyer County Record. Among Blue Hand Books' published writers are John Christian Hopkins, James Chavers Jr., and Hentz herself.

Publications

Books Honor Restored: Jim Thorpe's Olympic Medals from Olympics at the Millennium: Power, Politics and the Games, edited by Kay Shaffer and Sidonie Smith. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects. Greenfield, MA: Blue Hand Books, 2012. Sleeps with Knives (as Laramie Harlow). Greenfield, MA: Blue Hand Books, 2012. Two Worlds: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects. Greenfield, MA: Blue Hand Books, 2012. Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time (co-authored with MariJo Moore). Candler, NC: rENEGADE pLANETS pUBLISHING, 2013. ASIN B00C3M4824

Poetry In addition to her chapbook of poetry, Sleeps With Knives, Hentz has contributed poems to a number of publications:

What I Know in Spirit in the Woods, Bozell Worldwide/DaimlerChrysler, 1999. The Silence is So Loud in Invoking the Muse. International World of Poetry, 2004. Your God Doesn't Forget displayed in the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee, 2006. Your God Doesn't Forget, People Waking Up, and Heart-shaped Ass, beauty in pounds in Yellow Medicine Review, Spring 2008. Mankato, MN: Southern Minnesota State University, 2008. Jump in Rabbit and Rose (Kim Shuck ed.), 2010 and River Blood Corn, 2012. Earth's Funeral, Swallow Manifesto and Heart-shaped Ass in I Was Indian Vol. 2. Foothills Press, 2012. Swimmer in 30 Poems in November, Massachusetts, 2012.

Awards Hentz has received many awards from the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA), including:

Best News Story, Honorable mention, "Free Peltier" (1998) Pequot Times Monthly General Excellence (2nd place) (2003) Best Feature Writing, Eastern Pequot Tribe (2nd place) (2003)