Poet LeAnne Howe will read on Monday, February 6, 2017, on the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, campus as part of the Writers in the Library reading series. The mission of Writers in the Library is to “showcase the work of novelists, poets, and other literary craftsmen.” Some of the best voices on the literary scene today are invited to read.

The reading at 7 p.m. in the Lindsay Young Auditorium of the John C. Hodges Library is free and open to the public; all are encouraged to attend.

LeAnne Howe, the Eidson Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia, connects literature, Indigenous knowledge, Native histories, and expressive cultures in her work. Her interests include Native and indigenous literatures, performance studies, film, and Indigeneity. Professor Howe (Choctaw) is the recipient of a United States Artists (USA) Ford Fellowship, Lifetime Achievement Award by the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, American Book Award, and an 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 Literatures, Cultures, and Languages for Choctalking on Other Realities.

Her books include Shell Shaker (2001), Evidence of Red (2005), Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007), as well as Choctalking on Other Realities (2013). She 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). Howe’s most recent essay appears in a special issue of Studies in American Indian Literature (SAIL), Vol. 26, Number 2, Summer 2014, an exploration by scholars on her literary concept of Tribalography. Currently, she’s at work on a new play and a book of poems, Savage Conversations, about Mary Todd Lincoln and a Savage Indian she said tortured her each night in an insane asylum in Batavia, Illinois, in the summer of 1875. 

Read our interview with LeAnne Howe.

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Writers in the Library is sponsored by the UT Libraries and the Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For more information contact Erin Elizabeth Smith, Jack E. Reese Writer-in-Residence at the UT Libraries, at esmith83@utk.edu.

Visit http://library.utk.edu/writers for a complete schedule of Writers in the Library readings for the 2016-2017 academic year.

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