UIUC Creative Writing

LeAnne Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She writes fiction, poetry, screenplays, creative nonfiction, plays, and scholarship that primarily deal with American Indian experiences. Her 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, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

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 clerk. Set in 1907 and 2006, the novel spans nearly 100 years and examines the roots of American baseball.

In 2006-2007, Howe was selected as the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, Mississippi. In Spring 2003, she was the Louis D. Rubins Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University, Virginia.

LeAnne Howe is 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 (Choctaw) to the North Carolina homelands of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to reconcile her own identity as the daughter of a Cherokee father she never knew. She is writer/co-producer of the documentary Playing Pastime: American Indian Fast-Pitch Softball, and Survival, with three-time Emmy award winning filmmaker James Fortier.

She has read her fiction and been an invited lecturer in Japan, Jordan, Israel, Romania, and Spain. Founder and director of WagonBurner Theatre Troop, her plays have been produced in Los Angeles, New York City, New Mexico, Maine, Texas, and Colorado. January 23-24, 2009, Howe performed in a one-woman show titled Choctalking on Other Realities, Studio Theatre at the Krannert Center for Performing Arts in Urbana, Illinois in January 2009. She is at work on two new plays, "Love Story" about Betsy Love, a Chickasaw Indian woman that owned slaves, and a three-act play, “Ten Things” co-authored with Rob Sickler. For 2010-2011, Howe is a William J. Fulbright scholar and will be living in Amman, Jordan.