LeAnne Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is the Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature in English at the University of Georgia. Howe is the author of novels, plays and poetry, and screenplays. She is the on-camera narrator for a 90-minute PBS documentary, Indian Country Diaries, Spiral of Fire, 2006, and producer and writer for the 56-minute Searching for Sequoyah, airing in 2021, her third film collaboration with Ojibway filmmaker and director James M. Fortier.

Howe’s awards include: the American Book Award, Western Literature Association’s 2015 Distinguished Achievement Award; the inaugural 2014 MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures; and a 2012 United States Artists Ford Fellowship, among others. During the Arab Spring, 2010-2011, Howe was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Jordan, Amman. Her book, Savage Conversations, (Coffee House Press, 2019) is the story of Mary Todd Lincoln and the Savage Indian that Mary claimed tortured her nightly in 1875, which has been staged as a play in NYC, Seattle, and in Athens, GA.

Two major anthologies released in August are: Famine Pots: The Choctaw Irish Gift Exchange 1847-Present, Michigan State University Press, released in August 2020 co-edited by Howe and Irish scholar, Padraig Kirwan; and, When The Light of The World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, the ground breaking anthology covering two centuries of Native poetry, edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, LeAnne Howe, and Jennifer Elise Foerster. Both books appeared in August 2020. She is at work on a new book set in Stonewall, Oklahoma.