Sharice Davids’ rise to a seat in Congress is the stuff of storybooks. Literally.  

One of the first two Native American women elected to the House and the first openly LGBTQ representative from Kansas – now in her second term – Davids joins her co-author and illustrator in a discussion of her new, inspirational picture-book autobiography Sharice’s Big Voice: A Native Kid Becomes a Congresswoman.  

Illustrator Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley, a member of Wasauksing First Nation, is an Ojibwe Woodland-style artist from Barrie, Ontario. Nancy K. Mays, who teamed with Davis to tell her story, is an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Kansas whose writing has been published in Ploughshares, the Colorado Review, and Mid-American Review, among other publications.  

Davids, first elected to represent Kansas’ 3^rd District in the U.S. House in 2018, was raised by a single mother and the first in her family to attend college, graduating from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and going on to earn a law degree from Cornell Law School. Now a resident of Roeland Park, Kansas, she is a member of Wisconsin’s Ho-Chunk Nation.  

Sharice’s Big Voice, released in June, depicts her journey to the halls of Congress, underscoring that everyone’s path in life is different, with different obstacles.