Deborah Jackson Taffa is a Native American writer who is a member of the Quechan and Laguna Pueblo tribes.

She is best known for her 2024 memoir Whiskey Tender which details her life from the age of three to eighteen, growing up with a Native American father and a Catholic Latin-American mother.

She is the director of the MFA creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

[2] Whiskey Tender details Taffa's early life, growing up in Yuma, Arizona and then Farmington, New Mexico.

Her father, a Native American, was traumatized about his past, specifically regarding the racist hostility perpetrated against him and his family.