Professor LeAnne Howe cited as "one of Native America’s greatest writers and theorists"

Book on Professor LeAnne Howe Receives Rave Reviews from Top Journals 

Conversations with LeAnne Howe, edited by Kirstin L. Squint for the University of Mississippi Press's Literary Conversations Series, has received strong reviews from important journals in the field of native american and Indigenous studies. The book has now been reviewed in two top journals in the field such as The American Indian Quarterly and Native American and Indigenous Studies in their Winter 2033 and Fall 2023 issue respectively. 

Nicole Dib, who is a professor of English at Southern Utah University, comments, 

“LeAnne Howe’s wit, wide range of interests, and pithy analysis of issues related to race, politics, and interpretation make her a particularly compelling interviewee, and Kirstin Squint’s edited collection gives readers the opportunity to learn, through a more conversational approach, from one of Native America’s greatest writers and theorists.” 

The full review is available here.

James Mackay, professor of British and American Literatures at European University Cyprus, writes in the Fall 2023 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Native American and Indigenous Studies, “Howe has in the past decade increasingly been recognized as one of the foremost contemporary American Indian intellectuals. Her concept of tribalography, with its emphasis on the unification of genres rather than taxonomic division, stressing the central importance and power of tribal stories in the American narrative, has become a significant term of art in Native American literary studies. True to this mixed-genre sensibility—in one interview, she delights in Nathan Scott McNamara's description of her as a "genre chemist" (138)—she has created major interventions in multiple forms. One strand that runs through the interviews in the volume under review is the restlessness of her imagination, with multiple projects always on the go, always looking to overturn Euro-Western preconceptions and prioritize Native understandings, frequently in collaboration with others.” 

Quoting Professor Howe, Dr. Mackay adds that, “... American Indians are often pushed to the margins in U.S. literary discourse: discussed in the past tense as haunting ghosts, asked to fit with tired (and tiresome) stereotypes, made out to be the solemn validators of the colonizer's identity. Perhaps for that reason, there are still far too few monographs dedicated to individual Native American writers. Books of published interviews centered on one writer are even rarer: as far as I can tell, the only examples are the previous volumes, also put out by University Press of Mississippi, centered on Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, N. Scott Momaday, and Leslie Marmon Silko.” 

The review can be read here.