Paula Gunn Allen (October 24, 1939 – May 29, 2008) was an American poet, literary critic, activist,[1] professor, and novelist.

Of mixed-race European-American, Arab-American, and Native American descent, she identified with her mother's people, the Laguna Pueblo.

[3] Paula Marie Francis was born on October 24, 1939 in Cubero, New Mexico, a Spanish-Mexican land grant village bordering the Laguna Pueblo reservation.

[6][9] Her Lebanese-American father owned a local store, the Cubero Trading Company, and later served as the lieutenant governor of New Mexico from 1967 to 1970.

[11] She briefly attended the Colorado Women's College, then received a BA in English in 1966 and an MFA in creative writing in 1968 from the University of Oregon.

[10] At the University of Oregon, she studied under poet Ralph Salisbury, who claimed to be Cherokee and would have a heavy influence on Allen.

[12][13] Allen also credits N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn with restoring her sense of Native identity and alleviating a serious depressive episode while she worked on her master's degree.

As a student at the University of New Mexico, Allen reached out to a poetry professor, Robert Creeley, for poetic advice.

[14] Based on her own experiences and her study of Indigenous cultures, Paula Gunn Allen wrote The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986), published on Beacon Press.