Award-winning Native author Linda Hogan brings her performance poetry to campus

Chickasaw writer and environmental activist Linda Hogan will shine a literary light on the Native perspective on the world when she brings her latest work of long-form performance poetry to the campus on April 11 for the Southwest Writer's Institute's 4th Annual Maxwell Silver Memorial Reading. The event is free and open to public, with book signing to follow.

"Indios: A poem to be spoken" recasts the ancient Greek tale of Medea, whose children were murdered by the Corinthians and who was also feared for her cultural differences and her knowledge, through the story of a jailed Native woman accused of killing her children.

Hogan's many essays, novels, and poetry frequently explore the traditional indigenous view of and relationship to the land. Her work also studies the historical wrongs done to Native Americans and the American environment since the European colonization of North America.

Her most recent books are the poetry collection Rounding the Human Corners (2008) and the novel People of the Whale(2008). Her other books include the novels Mean Spirit, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of both the Oklahoma Book Award and the Mountains and Plains Book Award; Solar Storms, a finalist for the International Impact Award; and The Book of Medicines, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other poetry books have received the Colorado Book Award and an American Book Award.

Hogan has also received a prestigious Lannan Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim, and has been awarded the Mountains and Plains Lifetime Achievement Award. A Professor Emerita from the University of Colorado, she is now the writer-in-residence for the Chickasaw Nation, in Oklahoma, where she is researching and writing on Chickasaw history, mythology, and lifeways.

Hogan will perform "Indios" Wednesday, April 11, at 7 p.m. in Room 130, Noble Hall.

Learn more about Linda Hogan.