Stan Rushworth was born in 1944 and raised on the banks of the Stanislaus River in the east San Joaquin valley in California by his grandfather, who was of Cherokee descent. He served as an Army volunteer in the Far East during the Vietnam war, and attended San Francisco State University after coming home, where he received a Master of Arts degree in Language Arts and Creative Writing in 1970.

During the seventies, he lived and worked among the Maya in Guatemala, and moved to Hawaii in the eighties before returning to California in 1991. He has taught Native American Literature at Cabrillo College, in Aptos, California for the last twenty-nine years, including similar work at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a lecturer, and worked for eighteen years at Cabrillo’s Watsonville Center teaching basic skills and critical thinking surrounding Indigenous peoples’ issues, including six years as Director/Instructor of the Puente Program, a writing-centered project focused in the Chicano community.

He authored Sam Woods: American Healing (Station Hill Press, New York) in 1992, and Going to Water: The Journal of Beginning Rain (Talking Leaves Press, Freedom, CA) in 2014.

As a tenured faculty emeritus, he currently teaches Native American Literature at Cabrillo College, and works as an activist and advocate for Indigenous people as a teacher, writer and speaker. He is an enrolled citizen of the Chiricahua Apache Nation, and is also a member the Santa Cruz Indian Council, where he is an Advising Cultural Elder. He is the Elder in Residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz for 2019/20, with the American Indian Resource Center. He is married, with two sons and one grandson.