LeAnne Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is the Eidson Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia., connecting literature, Indigenous knowledge, Native histories, and expressive cultures in her work. In May 2024 she was awarded the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature presented by the Oklahoma Center For the Book in Oklahoma City. She writes fiction, poetry, screenplays, creative non-fiction, plays and scholarship that primarily deal with American Indian experiences. Her interests include Native and indigenous literature, performance studies, film, and Indigeneity. Howe’s 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, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Ground Floor Berkeley Rep Center for the Creation and Development of New Work.
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 2014, Howe’s memoir Choctalking on Other Realities, Aunt Lute Books, 2013, won the first MLA prize for Studies in Native American Literature, Cultures, and Languages.
In 2023, Howe was an invited artist to Ground Floor’s two-week Summer Residency program at U.C. Berkeley, working with dramaturge and playwright Emma Denson, and playwright and director Colm Summer. Their play, the Keening, was work-shopped and had a staged reading at Ground Floor.
Howe’s monograph Savage Conversations, 2019, Coffee House Press, set in 1875, is the story of Mary Todd Lincoln and a Savage Indian ghost that Mary claimed was torturing her nightly. As a result of her ravings, Mary was tried by an Illinois court and confined to an insane asylum at Batavia, Illinois. Recent performances of Savage Conversations with actors Marla Carlson, (UGA theater) Nic Billey, (Choctaw) and Nora Cole were performed on Govenors Island, NYC in September 2022.
Howe and Irish playwright Colm Summers’ play The Keening was performed in November 2022 at the Irish Cultural Centre in NYC. The play is set in Indian Territory, and Famine Ireland, and present-day New York. The three act play begins with Aoife, mourning the death of another child from starvation in Ireland. Kinta, a Choctaw in Indian Territory hears Aoife’s keening and responds with a Choctaw mourning song. The story time travels to modern NYC and centers around the eviction of a Choctaw mother and grandmother from their apartment in NYC. A U.S Marshall named Pat, an Irishman, has been sent to evict them. The first reading was held at the new Irish Arts Center in NYC, August 2021. In 2023 The Keening had a staged reading at the Berkeley Rep Theater in San Francisco.
Howe began work on a new musical with writer Nathan Dixon in 2021. Star Panther and the Gold Digger, The Musical. The play is about deSoto’s first encounter with Natives in 1540 and includes a pink flying deSoto car that belongs to the Lady of Cofitachequi. A Muskogean teenager, she and her friends prove to be deSoto’s undoing as they dance and sing their way across the heavens – destroying deSoto and the gated community he tried to create in what is now Florida.
Howe co-authored Famine Pots, The Choctaw-Irish Gift Exchange 1847-Present (2020), MSU Press, with Padraig Kirwan, Goldsmiths of London. In 2022, they were awarded the Gourmand World Cookbook special award, presented in Sweden at the annual conference. Famine Pots is the story of the Choctaw people’s gift to the Irish in 1847 for famine relief. Introductions in the book by Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins, and Choctaw Chief of the Choctaw Nation Gary Batton. Currently Kirwan and Howe are at work on a second book, Famine Pots II that focuses on the children of Irish Potato Famine, and the children of 1830s Choctaw removal from Mississippi. In June 2024 they gave a public presentation at the National Famine Museum in Strokestown, Ireland.
In 2020, the Norton anthology, When the Light of the World Was Subdued Our Songs Came Through, A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry was published. Joy Harjo, U.S. Poet Laureate is Executive Editor, Howe, Executive Associate editor, and Managing Editor is Jennifer Elise Forester. The landmark anthology covers two centuries of Native poetry and includes 160 Native poets. The book is considered essential reading for those interested in Native poetry.
Howe wrote and produced with James M. Fortier (producer, director) the PBS documentary film, Searching for Sequoyah that aired nationally in November, 2021. The story centers on the life and legacy of Sequoyah (George Guess), creator of the Cherokee syllabary. The 56-minute documentary received a Telly award for feature documentary in 2022. For more information see www.searchingforsequoyah.com. Howe was also 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 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.
Howe was the recipient of a United States Artists (USA) Ford Fellowship, Lifetime Achievement Award by the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, American Book Award, Oklahoma Book Award, and she was a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar to Jordan. In October 2015, Howe received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association, (WLA); and in 2014 she received the Modern Languages Association inaugural prize for Studies in Native American Literature, Cultures, and Languages, for her short story collection, Choctalking on Other Realities. I Fuck Up In Japan, a story from the collection has been reprinted in many journals.
Howe received an MFA from Vermont College, (2000) and shares a Native and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) award for literary criticism with eleven other scholars for Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, named one of the ten most influential books of the first decade of the twenty-first century for indigenous scholarship, 2011. She’s lectured nationally and internationally giving the Richard Hoggart Series lecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, and the Keynes Lecture at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK among others. In 1993 she lectured throughout Japan as an American Indian representative during the United Nations “International Year of Indigenous People.”
LeAnne also co-edited a book of essays on Native films with Harvey Markowitz, and Denise K. Cummings titled, Seeing Red, Pixeled Skins: American Indians and Film, 2013. In 2014, a special issue of Studies of American Indian Literature, SAIL, Vol. 26, Number 2, Summer, was published and is an exploration by six scholars on Howe’s literary concept of Tribalography.
She has a home in Ada, Oklahoma, where she and her husband Jim Wilson, host her family gatherings in summers and holidays, and in Athens, GA. She is the mother of Joe Craig, daughter-in-law, Debbie; Randy Craig, daughter-in-law Sheila Craig; and grandmother of Chelsey Craig, Alyssa Warren, Kaylyn Lammons, Katie Sellers, Kelsey Jaronski, Allison Woodall, Jacob Woodall, and great grandmother of Denton, Reed, Emma, Eli, Beckham, Charlotte, Teagan, Lawson, and Ryan.