Miko Kings

LeAnne Howe is a prolific author, poet, playwright, and scholar. Over the course of her career, Howe has authored several books, of which Miko Kings was her third. Other notable works by Howe include Shell Shaker (2001), which received the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award, and Choctalking on Other Realities (2013), which was the recipient of the inaugural 2014 MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. For her most recent monograph, Savage Conversations (2019), Howe was nominated for the 56th Georgia Author of the Year Award in 2020.

As an editor, she has worked on a number of notable projects. In 2020, she was the editor for When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: Norton Anthology of Native American Poetry. The collection was awarded the 2021 Oakland Josephine Miles Award and the 31st Annual Reading the West Book Award for Poetry (also in 2021). She co-edited Famine Pots: The Choctaw Irish Gift Exchange 1847-Present in 2020 alongside Irish writer Padraig Kirwan. She is the co-producer and writer of the PBS documentary Searching for Sequoyah, directed by James M. Fortier. Howe has also been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Jordan, in addition to residencies at MacDowell, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ragdale, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She is the recipient of the 2002 Worldcraft Circle Writer of the Year, and most recently, in May 2024, she was awarded the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award.

Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She was born in Oklahoma in 1951, and much of her writing centers on the (vastly untold) history of the Oklahoma Choctaws. Howe’s writing is often visceral and poetic, and she frequently pulls from traditional Choctaw songs and traditions. Like Lena in Miko Kings, Howe’s early career was as a journalist. She worked in journalism for 12 years before obtaining her MFA in creative writing from Vermont College. As she continued to write, her interests shifted to the world of academia. She has taught at universities across the United States and is currently the Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of Georgia, Athens.