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LeAnne Howe

 

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. In 2012, she was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, and she also received the 2012 USA Ford Fellowship in the Literature category.

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LeAnne Howe in her own words:

"I’m a thrill seeker.  It’s the reason that I picked up a pair of sticks in the sixth grade and decided to be rock and roll drummer in a stoner band.  It didn’t work out.  But by the seventh grade, I was the only female marching in the drumline during Friday night football games. At that time girls had to wear skirts to play on the drumline, so I had a 14 inch x 12 inch marching snare drum strapped onto my right leg with a skirt on.  Nearly broke my leg running up and down the field, but I got to play alongside the male drummers. 
 

Other thrills were not of my making: 1969 Midwest City, Oklahoma.  I was at home sick from my airport waitress job when a T-F-100 Super Sabre training jet crashed next door and took out three more houses in our Glenwood neighborhood block.  Our house was under the flight path of Tinker Field’s Air Force base.  The crash blew out all our windows, and set fire to an entire block of houses.  The pilot ejected and landed in our front yard; the co-pilot was trapped inside the cockpit and burned alive. I grabbed my dog Ginger, wrapped her in a towel and ran down the street with hot electrical wires popping all around us like firecrackers.  
 

In 1971, Joey, my 11-month-old son and I were on our way to see my family living in Wiesbaden, Germany.  The Boeing 747 aircraft operated by TWA was set to leave New York Kennedy International airport at 8 p.m.  A few minutes after takeoff one of the engines blew up and was on fire.  The airliner rocked and vibrated. Joey and I were in a window seat and I could see smoke billowing out of one of the engines. I covered him with my body and a pillow thinking that if the plane crashed, he might live if I didn't.  We both survived.  When my youngest son Randy was born in 1972, the three of us began to travel in a broken-down Pinto across America from Oklahoma to California. Okies.  I wanted my sons to see other places and how people lived.  Randy was fearless and would jump into any body of water including the Gulf of Mexico.  Often, I would have to jump in the water and pull him out. 
 

Much later when I went back to school, I knew I wanted to be a writer and tell stories that might thrill, amaze, and perhaps scare the hell out of readers. I am a Choctaw after all. One of my grandmothers was named Anolitubbee, Tells and Kills, and it’s the family name I’ve taken for myself.
Life is made up of extraordinary events and I’ve tried to write about my travels to Germany, Jordan, the West Bank, Israel, Gaza, Ireland, England, Japan, and British Columbia.  I was living in Jordan when the Arab Spring began.  In the 1990s I traveled to Gaza to see the people and how one government can strangle an entire population. Isn’t this the story of colonizers everywhere?  Certainly, it’s been the story of American Indians and our history in America, but we’re still here!  

 

I’m very fortunate to have met Jim Wilson, my husband in 1987.  He’d just returned home to Iowa from living in Beirut for ten years.  His life in Syria and Lebanon greatly influenced me.  We would go to the Middle East as Fulbright scholars and live in Amman, Jordan on two occasions in 1993, and 2010.   
 

I published my first poetry collection, Evidence of Red, 2005, Salt Publishing, UK, followed by three novels with Aunt Lute Books, Shell Shaker, 2001, was awarded an American Book Award.  The French translation, Équinoxes Rouges was awarded a Prix Medici Award, 2004, as a finalist for the translation of Shell Shaker.  These books were followed by Miko Kings, An Indian Baseball Story, 2007, and Choctalking on Other Realities, 2013, all published by Aunt Lute Books.  No one could have asked for a more thoughtful, diligent editorial staff than the women at Aunt Lute.  
 

In the early 2000s, I began making documentaries for public television with filmmaker James M. Fortier.  In 2021, we made a couple of films including Searching for Sequoyah, 2021, for PBS about the life of Sequoyah and his invention of the Cherokee Syllabary.  In 2022, Irish playwright Colm Summers and I wrote, The Keening.  The next year our play was selected for the Ground Floor: Berkeley Rep’s Center for the Creation and Development of New Work.  The Keening was developed and performed by actors in the program at Berkeley.  
 

My current project is the story of grandmother’s life during 1918 pandemic, a novella titled, Coleus.  After that, I’m turning my attention to the weather.  Will see what happens."

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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.

BOOKS

Shell Shaker

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Winner of the 2002 American Book Award

 

Why was Red Shoes, the most formidable Choctaw warrior of the 18th century, assassinated by his own people? Why does his death haunt Auda Billy, an Oklahoma Choctaw woman, accused in 1991 of murdering Choctaw Chief Redford McAlester? Moving between the known details of Red Shoes' life and the riddle of McAlester's death, this novel traces the history of the Billy women whose destiny it is to solve both murders—with the help of a powerful spirit known as the Shell Shaker.

Miko Kings

An Indian Baseball Story

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Miko Kings is set in Indian Territory's queen city, Ada, Oklahoma, during the baseball fever of 1907, but moves back and forth from 1969 during the Vietnam War to present-day Ada. The story focuses on an Indian baseball team but brings a new understanding to the term "America's favorite pastime." For tribes in Indian Territory, baseball was an extension of a sport they'd been playing for centuries before their forced removal to Indian Territory. In this lively and humorous work of fiction informed by careful historical research, LeAnne Howe weaves original and fictive documents such as newspaper clippings, photographs, typewritten letters, and handwritten journal entries into the narrative.

Choctalking on Other Realities

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The collected stories/essays in Choctalking on Other Realities, by Choctaw author LeAnne Howe, depict, with wry humor, the contradictions and absurdities that transpire in a life lived crossing cultures and borders. The result is three parts memoir, one part absurdist fiction, and one part marvelous realism. The collection begins with Howe’s stint working in the bond business for a Wall Street firm as the only American Indian woman (and ‘out’ Democrat) in the company, then chronicles her subsequent travels, invited as an American Indian representative and guest speaker, to indigenous gatherings and academic panels in Jordan, Jerusalem, Romania, and Japan. 

PRAISE FOR CHOCTALKING ON OTHER REALITIES

…In this extraordinary collection, LeAnne Howe does for Choctaw storytelling what The Hunger Games does for archery—makes something seemingly traditional and archaic feel edgy, new, and necessary.

— Dean Rader, author of Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature and Film

 

 

Choctalking is LeAnne Howe at her very best. Who else can mix hard-hitting social commentary with wicked wit and good old fashioned storytelling? Howe is a true citizen of the world and the relative at the party who can't stop telling the truth. This is a book that belongs in classrooms and book clubs, too. Everyone should read this book. Everyone. 

— Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow

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LeAnne Howe is a mound builder of story.  Like earthworks that gather far-flung nations and connect worlds above and below, these exquisite tales of travel and cross-cultural encounter align across geographies and generations, across embodied research and archival adventure, across wry humor and speculative analysis to reveal unexpected pattern, relationship, theory.  What emerges is sophisticated and complex, engineered not simply to endure but to spark future performance, to provoke story building of the reader’s own.

— Chadwick Allen, author of Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies

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