LeAnne Howe

LeAnne Howe is the gracious scholar, poet and writer who was the judge for the McKnight Fellowship in Creative Prose, 2015. At first I wondered what connected her to my writing, but after reading her latest book, Choctalking On Other Realities, I see that there are two connections. One is the use of humor (often self deprecating) to deal with difficult subjects, and the other is the self reflections and contemplating when crossing into other cultures and countries.

Choctalking is a multidimensional book that the reader instinctually knows to read beyond the surface, and pull off the layers to find the true meanings. The back cover wonderfully explains the book as ‘The adventure travel stories of Choctalking on Other Realities are three parts memoir, one part tragedy, one part absurdist fiction, and one part marvelous realism.’

About LeAnne taken from her FB page: She is an American author and Eidson Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Georgia, Athens. An enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Howe's work has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies. Her book Shell Shaker received the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for 2002. Evidence of Red, a collection of poetry, Salt Publishing, UK 2005 won the Oklahoma Book Award in 2006. Her second novel, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story was published in 2007 by Aunt Lute Books. Seeing Red: Pixeled Skins: American Indians and Film, Michigan State University Press 2013, an anthology of film essays on American Indians in movies is co-edited with Harvey Markowitz and Denise K. Cummings. Her latest book, a memoir titled Choctalking On Other Realities and was awarded the first the MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Language in 2015.