Begoña Echerverria is the daughter of Basque immigrants to southern California. A native Basque speaker with a PhD in sociology, she is a Professor at UC Riverside's Graduate School of Education. Her ethnographic work on Basque language schooling has appeared in academic journals in education, sociolinguistics, and anthropology (Echeverria 2003a, 2003b, 2005, 2007, 2010). She has also published work examining gender, identity and language use in Basque song (Echeverria 2014a, 2014b) biblical texts (Echeverria 2006, 2016), and folk tales (Echeverria 2016). Her creative works also include the historical novel The Hammer of Witches (The Hammer of Witches KVCR), loosely based on the 1610 burnings of Basque "witches" from the Baztan Valley in northern Spain from which her family hails.