Oscar Hokeah is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, with Mexican heritage through his father's family from Aldama, Chihuahua. He holds a master's degree in English, with a Native American literature concentration, from the University of Oklahoma, and a creative writing degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts. He has spent more than twenty years in work that serves Native communities. Today he works for Indian Child Welfare in Tahlequah.
He calls himself a regionalist writer of literary fiction. His territory is two Oklahoma communities, Tahlequah, where the Cherokee side of his family lives, and Lawton, where the Kiowa side does. He writes about how tribes, families and countries overlap there. The form of his fiction follows that interest. Instead of a lone narrator, his debut hands the story to a circle of people. In interviews he has described the novel as a decolonization narrative.
Calling for a Blanket Dance came out from Algonquin Books in July 2022. It won the 2023 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Ever Geimausaddle is the center of the book, from a childhood road trip to Mexico into adulthood. He never tells his own early story. Mothers, cousins, grandparents and others each take a turn, and a shared history builds up piece by piece. Hokeah has also written essays and articles for Poets & Writers, Literary Hub and World Literature Today.
Start with Calling for a Blanket Dance. It is the book readers know him by, and it shows his method at full strength: many voices, one family, and a community that holds a young man up while the world pushes on him.
