Thank you, Bojan.
Thank you so much.
I'm now going to introduce our first reader, LeAnne Howe.
LeAnne Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation
of Oklahoma, she is the Eidson Distinguished Professor
of American Literature and English
at the University of Georgia.
Howe is the author of novels, plays, and poetry,
and screenplays.
She is the on-camera narrator for a 90-minute PBS
documentary, Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire, 2006.
And producer and writer for the 56-minute Searching for Sequoia
airing in 2021, her third film collaboration with Ojibway
filmmaker and director James M. Fortier.
Howe's awards include the American Book Award,
Western Literature Association's 2015 Distinguished Achievement
Award, the inaugural of 2014 MLA Prize for Studies in Native
American Literature, and in 2012 United States Artist
for Fellowship among others.
During the Arab Spring of 2010-2011,
Howe was a scholar at the University of Jordan, Amman.
Her book Savage Conversations, Coffee House Press,
2019-- if you have not read that, please grab that soon.
Love that book.
It's a story of Mary Todd Lincoln and the savage Indian
that Mary claimed tortured her nightly in 1875, which
has been staged as a play in New York City, Seattle,
and in Athens, Georgia.
Two major anthologies released in August are Famine Pots:
The Choctaw Irish Gift Exchange, 1847
to Present by Michigan State University Press,
released in August 2020, co-edited
by Howe and Irish scholar Padraig Kirwan.
And When the Light of the World was Subdued,
Our Songs Came Through, an anthology
of Native Nations Poetry, the groundbreaking anthology
covering two centuries of Native poetry, which
we will be hearing from, edited by US Poet Laureate Joy
Harjo, LeAnne Howe, and Jennifer Elise Foerster.
Both books appeared in August 2020.
She is at work on a new book set in Stonewall, Oklahoma.
Thank you, LeAnne, for being here with us today.
And I welcome you with gratitude and hope.