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Notable Writers of the American West & the Native American Experience

LeAnne Howe

by Laura Nicosia, James F. Nicosia

Fiction Writer, Playwright, Poet, and Scholar

Born: April 29, 1951, Oklahoma

Biography

LeAnne Howe is the current Edison Distinguished Professor in American Literature at the University of Georgia where she works to explore the intersections of literature, Indigenous knowledge, Native histories, and expressive cultures. Howe is an enrolled Choctaw and uses her passion for Native studies to plumb Indigenous literatures, performance, films, and what she calls, “Indigeneity.”

Previously, LeAnne Howe was associate professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in the American Indian Studies program. She also taught in the MFA program in Creative Writing in English. In 2003, she was the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University, Roanoke, VA and has been a visiting professor at: Carleton College, Grinnell College, Sinte Gleska University in South Dakota, on the Rosebud Sioux reservation, Wake Forest University, the University of Cincinnati, and at the University of Minnesota.

Born and educated in Oklahoma, Howe attended Oklahoma State University, majoring in English. After graduation, she was employed at small newspapers in Texas, eventually moving to the Dallas Morning News. While raising two sons, she worked for a Wall Street securities firm and traveled between New York City and her home in Texas on a fairly regular basis.

She obtained her MFA in creative writing from Vermont College in 2000 and has done readings of her fiction in Japan, Jordan, Israel, Romania, and Spain. As the founder and director of the Wagon Burner Theatre Troop, Howe’s plays have been produced in Los Angeles, New York City, New Mexico, Maine, Texas, South Dakota, and Colorado.

Howe is the screenwriter and on-camera narrator for a documentary on PBS called Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire. This ninety-minute program follows Howe as she travels to North Carolina to examine how the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians fuse tourism, community, tradition, and still preserve their culture in the twenty-first century. While doing so, Howe attempts to reconcile her own identity as she comes to terms with the Cherokee father she never knew.

Her award-winning books include, Shell Shaker (2001), Evidence of Red (2005), Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007), and Choctalking on Other Realities (2013). She coedited a book of essays on Native films Seeing Red, Pixeled Skins: American Indians and Film (2013). She has recently written a monograph, Savage Conversations (2019) about Mary Todd Lincoln and a Native American who supposedly tortured her nightly in an insane asylum while she was a patient in Batavia, Illinois, during the summer of 1875. She and coproducer James. M. Fortier, are completing new documentary film project, Searching for Sequoyah.

Evidence of Red received the Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry (2006). This collection fuses both poetry and prose wile it condemns the violence enacted against the Native American tribes. Miko Kings, is a Native American baseball novel set in Ada, Oklahoma, in 1903 that follows Hope Little Leader, the Choctaw pitcher who possesses the most disturbed pitch delivery in the annals of Indigenous baseball. Other characters include Blip Bleen, Batteries Goingsnake, Lucius Mummy, and Ezol Daggs, a Choctaw postal worker who attempts to patent her own theory of relativity (challenging Einstein’s) and in doing so, changes the history of both the Native Americans and the Miko Kings baseball team.

Howe’s short film project with Ojibway James Fortier, Playing Pastime: American Indian Fast-Pitch Softball, and Survival (2007), is the story is about southeastern tribes who have been playing baseball and fast-pitch softball since the 1880s in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). The central theme of this film is a discussion of how sports in general and baseball in particular helped the tribes survive, thrive, and find joy despite the wars, genocide, oppressions, and erasure Native Americans have faced throughout American history.

In 2020, Howe and Fortier came together again to produce what they called “CinéLit,” or “a merger of cinema and literature in a digital format.” Howe’s website says, “CinéLit combines the power of narrative storytelling with the visual and aural expression of cinema to create a new digital media platform.” Their first production was the 2021 Memoir of a Choctaw Indian in the Arab Revolts, 1917 and 2011.

Howe is currently the coexecutive associate editor, along with US poet laureate Joy Harjo, and managing editor Jennifer Elise Forester for When the Light of the World Was Subdued Our Songs Came Through, A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020). This landmark anthology covers two centuries of Native poetry by upwards of 160 Native poets.

Analysis

In Howe’s Shell Shaker, the author challenges her readers to open their eyes to the corruptions in upper government—in our leaders. Howe critiques and confronts American history which sought to divide, oppress, and marginalize people of color and especially so for Native Americans.

In Shell Shaker, two greedy leaders of different countries who divide their peoples by declaring wars. However, the book is also about communities who attempt to find balance on earth and with the spirits. Howe blurs the ideas of past and present—dismantling the very ideas of chronology and linearity of time. By doing do, Howe effectively challenges the reader to question the nature of causality in the past and present.

Voices from the Gaps writes, “Power transmits through the voice behind her vivid, tangible descriptions and her beautiful, drop-dead-funny dialogues. She strikes a nice balance between describing and telling. She balances the horrific reality of war and death with the restoring and often humorous dynamics of love and family.”

Howe’s Savage Conversations (2019) experiments with verse drama to articulate the Dakhóta struggle against colonization. She also explores the lore surrounding Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. Lincoln’s widow, Mary Todd Lincoln, was committed to an asylum for ten years after his assassination. Mary Todd Lincoln claims to be tortured every evening by both a Native American and a noose. Neurnberger writes:

The story is a reckoning of hauntings and unprosecuted crimes, an attempt at imagining some way to live with an unbearable history of human rights abuses and genocide.

Among the many rhetorical and craft techniques worthy of praise in Howe’s writing is her insightful and deft use of dramatic monologues. Mary Todd Lincoln speaks of her visions, grief, and rage with a complexity that invites a measure of compassion alongside a clear-eyed understanding of the very real racism that lends its form and shape to her hallucinations.

Howe’s depiction of the emotionally wounded and mentally ill First Lady calls into question the cultural assumptions of white fragility and the supposed heroism of Mary and her husband (Lincoln) who freed the slaves but waged a genocide against the Dakhóta tribe (men, women, and children).

Ultimately, the reader will encounter with Howe’s writings a deep-seated desire for community and healing. Divisions and oppressions never provide health for communities. Only through the knowledge that comes from confronting America’s history will we have the power to reconcile our past with our present, so we can move forward to a future that has harmony and respect. Her activity and production are seemingly boundless, and certainly by the time this entry is published, she already will have taken part in and/or created new conversations on Indigenous/non-Indigenous respect and harmony.

Achievements

Howe is the recipient of a United States Artists Ford Fellow, Lifetime Achievement Award by the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, an American Book Award, an Oklahoma Book Award, and was named a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar. In 2015, Howe received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association. In 2014 she received the Modern Languages Association Inaugural Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages for her book, Choctalking on Other Realities.

Howe has shared a Native and Indigenous Studies Association award for with eleven other scholars for Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective. This collection was one of the ten most influential books of the first decade of the twenty-first century (Indigenous scholarship, 2011). Howe has lectured nationally and internationally—traveling to the University of London (2011) and the University of Kent (2013), She has lectured in Japan as an American Indian representative during the United Nations “International Year of Indigenous People.”

Howe has won a 2006 Oklahoma Book Award for Evidence of Red and in 2006-7, she won the John and Renee Grisham Writer in Residence Fellowship as an emerging southern writer. Her first novel, Shell Shaker received an American Book Award (2002) from the Before Columbus Foundation. The novel was awarded Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year (2002). Her Équinoxes Rouge, was the 2004 finalist for Prix Medici Estranger, one of France’s top literary awards.

In 1993, Howe held a Smithsonian Institution Native American internship where she studied nineteenth-century missionary documents on the changes in the Choctaw language. She was an artist-in-residence on an Iowa Arts Council Grant in 1993. It was at this time that she wrote, produced and directed Indian Radio Days, a play that was broadcast to all National Public Radio stations in the Midwest on Columbus Day.

Selected Works

Fiction

Shell Shaker, 2001

Équinoxes Rouges, 2004

Evidence of Red: Poems and Prose, 2005

Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story, 2007

Savage Conversations, 2019

Nonfiction

Choctalking on Other Realities, 2013

Seeing Red: Pixeled Skins, American Indians and Film, 2013

Famine Pots: The Choctaw-Irish Gift Exchange, 1847-Present, 2020

Plays

Big PowWow, 1987

Indian Radio Days, 1998

The Mascot Opera, 2008

Films

Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire (screenwriter and on-camera narrator), 2006

Playing Pastimes: American Indian Fast-Pitch Softball, and Survival (coproduced with James Fortier), 2007

Seeing Red (coedited with Harvey Markowitz, and Denise K. Cummings), 2013

Selected Bibliography

1 

ILeanneHowe.com.

2 

“LeAnne Howe (Choctaw)-Searching for Sequoyah.” searchingforsequoyah.com. This is the official website for the documentary feature that chronicles the life, accomplishments, and mysterious death of the Cherokee heroine, Sequoyah.

3 

“LeAnne Howe: Multicultural Women’s Press Aunt Lute Books.” www.auntlute.com/leanne-howe. Multicultural Women’s Press | Queer Publishing | Aunt Lute Books. This website offers quotes by Howe, a brief biographical statement, and a brief analysis of several of Howe’s projects.

4 

“LeAnne Howe: Shell Shaker by LeAnne Howe.” Voices from the Gaps, conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/167791/Review%20Shell%20Shaker.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. This authoritative source discusses Howe’s Shell Shaker and provides insight into the text along with a bibliography for the novice researcher interested in Howe’s works.

5 

“LeAnne Howe.” Storytellers: Native American Authors Online. Welcome to Hanksville, www.hanksville.org/storytellers/LAHowe/. Hanksville’s site is a good starting place for information on Howe and other Indigenous writers. This site offers several links (some active, some not) to resources in varied categories.

6 

Monika, Siebert. “Fictions of the Gruesome Authentic in LeAnne Howe’s Shell Shaker.” Indians Playing Indian: Multiculturalism and Contemporary Indigenous Art in North America. U of Alabama P, 2015. This chapter explores the multicultural erasure of Native Americans, explores this erasure throughout North American history and shows how contemporary Indigenous artists seek agency while offering narratives of their nations to resist assimilation and obliteration.

7 

Nuernberger, Kathryn. “Forms of Reckoning: A Review of LeAnne Howe’s Savage Conversations.” Kenyon Review, kenyonreview.org/reviews/savage-conversations-by-leanne-howe-738439/. This scholarly and sensitive review of Howe’s Savage Conversations is an ideal entry into the stylistics and craftsmanship of Howe’s writings.

8 

“On the Prairie Diamond: The Weblog of LeAnne Howe.” On the Prairie Diamond: The Weblog of LeAnne Howe, mikokings.wordpress.com. This online journal run by Howe offers a series of first-person narratives updating the reader on her recent projects, appearances, and thoughts.

9 

Squint, Kirstin L. “Choctawan Aesthetics, Spirituality, and Gender Relations: An Interview with LeAnne Howe.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S, vol. 35, no. 3, Fall 2010, pp. 211-24. This interview in MELUS explores various ethnic, cultural, and racial issues faced by Native Americans, particularly the Choctaw. Squint helps the reader sift through Howe’s use of humor that undergirds her writings.

10 

———. LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature. Louisiana State UP, 2018. Squint’s appreciation for the uniqueness of Howe’s work and vision is apparent in her attempts to place her between two literary traditions.

11 

———, editor. Conversations with LeAnne Howe. UP of Mississippi, 2022. Interviews with Howe collected by her foremost scholar.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Nicosia, Laura, and James F. Nicosia. "LeAnne Howe." Notable Writers of the American West & the Native American Experience, edited by Laura Nicosia & James F. Nicosia, Salem Press, 2021. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=NativeWrite_0062.
APA 7th
Nicosia, L., & Nicosia, J. F. (2021). LeAnne Howe. In L. Nicosia & J. F. Nicosia (Eds.), Notable Writers of the American West & the Native American Experience. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Nicosia, Laura and Nicosia, James F. "LeAnne Howe." Edited by Laura Nicosia & James F. Nicosia. Notable Writers of the American West & the Native American Experience. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2021. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.