LeAnne Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation and a Professor of American Indian Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She writes fiction, poetry, screenplays, creative non-fiction, plays, and scholarship that primarily deal with American Indian experiences. Her short fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Fiction International, and Story among other journals and has been translated into French, Italian, German, Dutch, and Danish. Her novel, Shell Shaker (Aunt Lute Books, 2001), received an American Book Award in 2002. Equinoxes Rouge, the French translation, was the 2004 finalist for Prix Medici Estranger. She is the author of two additional titles from Aunt Lute, MIKO KINGS: AN INDIAN BASEBALL STORY (2007) and, most recently, CHOCTALKING ON OTHER REALITIES (2013). As a 2010 -2011 William J. Fulbright Scholar, Howe lived in Amman, Jordan to research her forthcoming novel. In 2012, she was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, and in December 2012, Howe received a USA Ford Fellowship to continue her research.