Kristina Jacobsen is a cultural anthropologist, an ethnographer, and a singer-songwriter living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. An associate professor of music and of anthropology (ethnology) at the University of New Mexico (UNM), her research interests focus on language, identity and expressive culture. She is the author of The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging. The book focuses on her time singing and playing with Navajo country-western bands on the Navajo Nation, and is the winner of the 2018 Woody Guthrie Award for an exceptional book about popular music. Jacobsen is a touring singer-songwriter, fronts the all-female honky-tonk band Merlettes, and is the founder and co-facilitator of the UNM Honky-Tonk Ensemble. For 2019–2020, she has been doing fieldwork, supported as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar and by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, for a new book project on songwriting, language reclamation, and Italian colonialism on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia.