UGA Professor and Choctaw Nation Citizen LeAnne Howe Honored with Lifetime Achievement Award in Oklahoma

LeAnne Howe, a UGA faculty member, will receive the 2024 Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award. The Oklahoma Department of Libraries and the Friends of the Oklahoma Center for the Book will present this award in Oklahoma City on May 11, 2024. The award recognizes significant contributions to literature and honors historian and professor Arrell Gibson.

Howe is the Eidson Distinguished Professor in American Literature at UGA and directs the Institute of Native American Studies. Her accolades include a United States Artists Ford Fellowship and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. She has also won an American Book Award and an Oklahoma Book Award.

Howe has co-authored 'Famine Pots, The Choctaw-Irish Gift Exchange 1847-Present' with Padraig Kirwan. She served as an executive associate editor for the Norton anthology, 'When the Light of the World Was Subdued Our Songs Came Through,' a collection of two centuries of Native poetry.

Her other works include 'Shell Shaker,' 'Evidence of Red,' 'Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story,' and 'Choctalking on Other Realities.' Her writing often addresses themes important to Native American history and culture. Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation.