“I became a writer so I could go off in all directions, meet new people, write about what I’ve hungered to know.” As a 2010-2011 William J. Fulbright Scholar, LeAnne Howe has been living in Amman, Jordan researching her latest novel, Memoir of a Choctaw Indian in the Arab Revolt of 1917, set in Bilaad ash Sham, and Allen, Oklahoma.

LeAnne Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation and writes fiction, poetry, screenplays, creative non-fiction, plays, and scholarship that primarily deal with American Indian experiences. Her short fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review, Fiction International, Callaloo, Story, Yalobusha Review, Cimarron Review, Platte Valley Review, and elsewhere, and has been translated in France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark. She has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale Writers Residency, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Her first novel, Shell Shaker (Aunt Lute Books, 2001), received an American Book Award in 2002 from the Before Columbus Foundation. The novel was a finalist for the 2003 Oklahoma Book Award, and awarded Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year, 2002. Equinoxes Rouge, the French translation, was the 2004 finalist for Prix Medici Estranger, one of France’s top literary awards. Evidence of Red (Salt Publishing, UK, 2005) won the Oklahoma Book Award for poetry in 2006, and the Wordcraft Circle Award for 2006. Howe’s most recent novel is Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (Aunt Lute Books, 2007) was the Hampton University’s Read-In-Selection for 2009-2010.  In 2011, Howe was award the Tulsa Library Trust Award for her work as an American Indian writer Tulsa, Oklahoma.

To read more about Howe’s many accomplishments and accolades in university classrooms, theater stages, and—of course—on the written page, visit LeAnne Howe’s website.