Rita Green Breeze — Songs of the Sky-Line

Rita Green Breeze wrote for the page, the platform, and the concert room. Her 1924 Songs of the Sky-Line joins desert color, flight, city modernity, public recitation, and musical cadence; newspaper notices place her in Los Angeles clubs and programs for decades, often beside composers and performers. She also promoted herself as “Sun Rise” in Native-themed cultural programs and led an organization called the American Indian Association, claims that must be read against the era’s appetite for invented and theatrical Indigeneity. This edition resets her surviving book and recoverable uncollected pieces, while the biography follows Rita Breeze into her later life as Rita Thornton and restores the public, collaborative career around the poems.