Linda Hogan

Linda Hogan (Chickasaw)Writer in Residence for The Chickasaw Nation, is an internationally recognized public speaker and writer of poetry, fiction, and essays. Her two new books are Rounding the Human Corners (Coffee House Press, April 2008, Pulitzer nominee) and People of the Whale (Norton, August 2008). Her other books include novels Mean Spirit, a winner of the Oklahoma Book Award, the Mountains and Plains Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Solar Storms, a finalist for the International Impact Award, and Power, also a finalist for the International Impact Award in Ireland. WW Norton has published her fiction. In poetry, The Book of Medicines was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other poetry has received the Colorado Book Award, Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, an American Book Award, and a prestigious Lannan Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. In addition, she has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, The Wordcraft Circle, and The Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association. Her nonfiction includes Dwellings, A Spiritual History of the Land; and The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. In addition, she has, with Brenda Peterson, written Sightings, The Mysterious Journey of the Gray Whale for National Geographic Books, and edited several anthologies on nature and spirituality. She has written the script, Everything Has a Spirit, a PBS documentary on American Indian Religious Freedom. Hogan was inducted into the Chickasaw Nation Hall of Fame in 2007 for her writing. She has also worked with Native youth in horse programs and continues to teach Creative Writing. A former Professor at the University of Colorado she now lives and works in Oklahoma. Her newest work is as editor of thirty years of Parabola essays for a book, The Inner Journey: Native Traditions, from Morning Light Press, recently published. This is a collection of essays on Native myth and tradition excerpted from Parabola Magazine. In addition, she has just had a short documentary PBS/​American Experience posted for the REEL/​NATIVE series, A Feel for the Land. Hogan was only the second minority woman at the University of Colorado to become a Full Professor. Her main interests as both writer and scholar are environmental issues, indigenous spiritual traditions and culture. She is currently on the Board of Advisors for Orion Magazine, an environmental journal.

Her new book INDIOS, a long poem and performance piece, is being scheduled for publicaation by Coffee House Press.

Hogan is currently researching, traveling, and writing Chickasaw history, mythology, and lifeways: Rivers and Mounds of the Heart in addition to poetry and essays.

Hogan has also been involved for fifteen years with the Native Science Dialogues and the new Native American Academy and for many years with the SEED Graduate Institute in Albuquerque. She is a faculty member for the Indigenous Education Institute. She was one of two invited writer-speakers at the United Nations Forum in 2008. Hogan has had work translated in all major languages by the U.S. Information Office, and speaks and reads her work both nationally and internationally, most recently in Spain as keynote speaker at the Eco-criticism gathering in Alcala’ and at major universities in Taiwan, at the International Studies on Religion, Culture, and Nature in Amsterdam, and is a fellow of the Black Earth Institute.

She was a Plenary Speaker at the Environmental Literature Conference in Turkey in November 2009, and presented a 90 minute program at the International Congress of the Parliament of World Religions in Melbourne, as well as moderating and speaking on a panel on Tribal Sovereignty at the same Congress in December 2009.

This morning
when the chill that rises up from the ground is warmed,
the snow is melted
where the small deer slept.
See how the bodies leave their mark.
The snow reveals their paths on the hillsides,
the white overcrossing pathways into the upper meadows
where water comes forth and streams begin.
With a new snow the unseen becomes seen.
Rivers begin this way.

At the deer dance last year,
after the clashing forces of human good and evil,
the men dressed in black,
the human women mourning for what was gone,
the evergreen sprigs carried in a circle
to show the return of spring.
That night, after everything human was resolved,
a young man, the chosen, became the deer.
In the white skin of its ancestors,
wearing the head of the deer
above the human head
with flowers in his antlers, he danced,
beautiful and tireless,
until he was more than human,
until he, too, was deer.

Of all those who were transformed into animals,
the travelers Circe turned into pigs,
the woman who became the bear,
the girl who always remained the child of wolves,
none of them wanted to go back
to being human. And I would do it, too, leave off being human
and become what it was that slept outside my door last night.

One evening I hid in the bush south of here
and watched at the place where they shed their antlers
and where the deer danced, it was true,
as my old grandmother said,
water came up from the ground
and I could hear them breathing at the crooked river.
The road there I know, I live here,
and always when I walk it
they are not quite sure of me,
looking back now and then to see that I am still
far enough away, their gray-brown bodies,
the scars of fences,
the fur never quite straight,
as if they'd just stepped into it.