With the publication of her first novel, Shell Shaker (2001), Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe quickly emerged as a crucial voice in twenty-first-century American literature. Her innovative, award-winning works of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism capture the renewal of Native American life and interrogate both cultural and linguistic oppression throughout the United States.
Savage Conversations (2019)
May 1875: Mary Todd Lincoln is addicted to opiates and tried in a Chicago court on charges of insanity. Entered into evidence is Ms. Lincoln’s claim that every night a Savage Indian enters her bedroom and slashes her face and scalp. She is swiftly committed to Bellevue Place Sanitarium. Her hauntings may be a reminder that in 1862 President Lincoln ordered the hanging of thirty-eight Dakotas in the largest mass execution in United States history. No one has ever linked the two events―until now. SAVAGE CONVERSATIONS is a daring account of a former first lady and the ghosts that tormented her for the contradictions and crimes on which this nation is founded.
Purchase here.
Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007)
MIKO KINGS: AN INDIAN BASEBALL STORY is an homage to the dusty roads and wind-blown diamonds of America’s first moving picture about baseball, His Last Game. Just as Henri Day and his team, the Miko Kings, are poised to win the 1907 Twin Territories’ Pennant against their arch rivals, the Seventh Cavalrymen from Fort Sill, pitcher Hope Little Leader finds himself embroiled in a plot that will destroy him and the Indian team. Only the town’s chimeric postal clerk, Ezol Day, understands the outcome of Hope’s last game and how it will affect Indians and baseball for the next four generations.
Set in Indian Territory, which is about to become part of Oklahoma, MIKO KINGS tells of the turbulent days before statehood when white settlers and gamblers are swindling the Indians out of their land. “They’re stories that travel now as captured light in someone else’s telescope,” Ezol Day will tell the woman who should have been her granddaughter. In MIKO KINGS, LeAnne Howe bends the pitch of time to return us to the roots of America’s national game.
Purchase here.
Shell Shaker (2001)
Red Shoes, the most formidable Choctaw warrior of the eighteenth century, was 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.
“LeAnne Howe has done it. SHELL SHAKER is an elegant, powerful and knock out story. I’m blown away.”—Joy Harjo.
Purchase here.