LeAnne Howe
- Professor, American Indian Studies, English, and Theatre
- Office: American Indian Studies, Room 2003
Phone: 217-265-9870
Email: ileannehowe@gmail.com
Teaching Interests
American Indian Studies, literature, film studies, and Native performance and indigenous theater
Research Interests
- developing a new storytelling form that redefines the twenty-first century Native novel as multimodal, multi-genre and trans-Indigenous;
- Indigenous Game Theory, a creative non-fiction book (nearing completion) about how an ancient ball game played at Earthworks sites helped develop kinship networks that may have augmented the growth of modern Southeastern tribes;
- part of an seven-member research team awarded a four-year research grant through Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) housed at Guelph University in Guelph. Our project "Indigenous Knowledge, Contemporary Performance" takes as its starting point the intersection of two research creation projects for indigenous theatre, a) embodied research on the recovery of Indigenous knowledge[s] at ancient Earthworks sites, and b) the development of trans-indigenous dramaturgies. I'm currently writing a new play with Native playwright and actress Monique Mojica. Our play will be the culmination of research gleaned from the SSHRC project.
Recent Awards
- Winner of the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas: Ceremony, Sept 5-7, 2012 Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
- November 2011: Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. One of 30 American Indians authors to celebrate the works of, during November’s Native American Heritage Month.
- June, 2011: NAISA (Native American and Indigenous Studies Association) votes Reasoning Together, The Native Critics Collective, one of the ten most influential books in the first decade of the twenty-first century by the membership of over 800 scholars.
- March 5, 2011. Awarded Tulsa Library Trust's "American Indian Author Award" at Central Library, Tulsa, OK.
- J. William Fulbright Scholar, 2010-2011. University of Jordan, Amman.
Biography
LeAnne Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She writes fiction, poetry, screenplays, creative non-fiction, plays and scholarship that primarily deal with American Indian experiences. Her short fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Fiction International, Callaloo, Story, Yalobusha Review, Cimarron 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. Miko Kings: An American Indian Baseball Story (Aunt Lute Books, 2007) is the story of a Choctaw baseball pitcher Hope Little Leader, Justina Maurepas, his black-Indian lover, an all-Indian baseball team, and Ezol Day, a Choctaw postal worker who comes back across time to tell her story to a woman who should have been her granddaughter. Set in 1907 and 2006, the novel spans nearly 100 years and examines the roots of American baseball.
In 2006-2007 she was selected as the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, MS. Spring 2003, she was the Louis D. Rubins Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University, VA. In 2004 she was the Regents Distinguished Lecturer at University of California, Riverside.
LeAnne is the screenwriter and on-camera narrator for the 90-minute PBS documentary Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire that aired nationally in 2006. Part memoir, part tribal history the film takes Howe (Choctaw) to the North Carolina homelands of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to discover how their fusion of tourism, community, and cultural preservation is the key to the tribe's health in the twenty-first century. Along the way Howe seeks to reconcile her own identity as the daughter of a Cherokee father she never knew.
She is writer/co-producer of the documentary Playing Pastime: American Indian Fast-Pitch Softball, and Survival, with three-time Emmy award winner filmmaker, James Fortier.
LeAnne has read her fiction and been an invited lecturer in Japan, Jordan, Israel, Romania, and Spain. Founder and director of WagonBurner Theatre Troop her plays have been produced in Los Angeles, New York City, New Mexico, Maine, Texas, and Colorado. Her most recent one-act play, The Mascot Opera, A Minuet was commissioned by Mixed Blood Theater in 2008, Minneapolis. She performed in a one-woman show titled Choctalking on Other Realities for the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Urbana, Illinois in January 09. Her most recent accomplishment is winning the Tulsa Library Trust's American Indian Words Award.
In 2010-2011 Howe received a Distinguished William J. Fulbright Scholarship and she lived in Amman, Jordan during the Arab Spring. She taught at the University of Jordan and researched a new novel set in 1913-1917, and the present. The story journeys from Allen, Oklahoma to Ottoman Beirut, to the Arab Revolt, to post-Ottoman Transjordan.
Wadi Rum, Jordan
Forthcoming
Seeing Red, Pixeled Skins: American Indians and film
Thirty-six lively essays on thirty-six films by leading American Indian scholars and filmmakers from the 1920s to the twenty-first century. Edited by LeAnne Howe, Harvey Markowitz and Denise Cummings. Michigan State University Press. At press.
Works in progress
Novel
- Memoir of a Choctaw in the Arab Revolts. Set in Allen, Oklahoma and Bilaad ash Sham, 1917 – 2011.
Articles
- "Comes Now Base and Ball's Tribalography. . . Embodied Story." For a Special Issue of ASAIL. Builds on the story of tribalography [my term] in Native literary studies.
- "Natives and Performance Culture" for The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literatures. Editors: Daniel Justice, James Cox.
Books
