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LeAnne Howe says she has always known she was a writer. “I can’t remember not knowing that I was going to write,” she says. 

The celebrated author, poet, and University of Georgia professor visited the 51�Թ� campus in early April, with support from the Center for the Humanities. She presented a Scholars’ Convocation, led a writers’ workshop, and met with students, staff, and faculty during her one-day visit.

As a member of the Choctaw Nation, Howe brings a distinct perspective to her work, encompassing literature, Indigenous knowledge, Native histories, and her own poetic sensibilities. Among her many honors, she has won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, the American Book Award, and the Oklahoma Book Award. She is also the Eidson Distinguished Professor in American Literature at the University of Georgia at Athens. 

Smoke Rings and Stories

As a girl growing up in Oklahoma, Howe spent many summers with her adoptive Cherokee grandmother. If Howe woke up in the night and couldn’t go back to sleep, they would sit together in the darkened living room, and the older woman would tell stories. 

Howe’s grandmother hid her smoking from most people, but with her granddaughter in the middle of the night, she puffed on a cigarette and spun tales like smoke rings rising into the air. These were not soothing stories designed to lull a child back to sleep. They were often terrifying tales, like one Howe recalls about a man who turned into a giant black bird that flapped off through the trees. 

“She didn’t think I should have any fear,” Howe says. 

“That’s the way I learned to hear a story, interpret a story, and then tell it.” Howe began to write down her own stories in a notebook, stories about clouds, monsters, and all the other things that populated her imagination. 

“She’s really the biggest influence on my life,” Howe says. “She gifted me the art of storytelling.” 

A Story of Survival

Howe, who has written fiction, poetry, history, and plays, is now at work on a memoir that tells her grandmother’s story, tentatively titled 1918 Union Valley Road. It begins during the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. 

During that flu epidemic, Howe’s grandmother and her Irish husband both fell ill. When he died in the bed beside her, people assumed she would die, too. They made plans to bury them together.

 grandmother did not die, but her life after the flu was more difficult than ever. She was a widow with no farm, no food, and no husband. The bank even took the cow. “She was one step above starvation,” Howe says. 

What she had was resilience. She survived because she refused to give up. 

Howe says we often forget how difficult it was for women in the past. “I think my life has been a cakewalk in comparison,” she says.

No one is more surprised than she is that this book is taking the form of poetry.

“I was shocked by that. It just started coming out in poetry,” Howe says. She describes it as creative nonfiction in a poetry frame, and she believes the story chose to be told this way. “The poem or the story, it decides what frame it should be in. I don’t make that decision. I just start writing.”

This belief is in line with her philosophy as a writer: the story seeks you out, not the other way around. “It finds you, and it wants whatever it wants,” Howe says.

Teaching Another Generation

Howe says she loved visiting 51�Թ� and especially meeting with students.

“They were all so earnest and ready to make changes. And the energy’s there,” she says.

Teachers often make a profound impact on their students, whether they know it or not, Howe says, and she is honored to be a teacher as well as a writer. 

She is inspiring the next generation of storytellers, just as her grandmother inspired her.