Kelli Jo Ford: Crooked Hallelujah

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Kelli Jo Ford will be in conversation with Daystar/Rosalie Jones 

Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine—a mixed-blood Cherokee woman—and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. Life in Texas isn’t easy, however, and Reney feels unmoored from her family in Indian Country. Against the vivid backdrop of the Red River, we see their struggle to survive in a world—of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces—intent on stripping away their connections to one another and their very ideas of home.

“Full of poetry… Ford’s prose is so absorbing that you’re right there… [Her] pages ache with tenderness and love and no small amount of frustration… These stories stand up beautifully to rereading; they made me excited for what the writer will do next.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, the Everett Southwest Literary Award, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Award at Bread Loaf, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, among other places.

Daystar/Rosalie Jones was born on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana and acknowledges Pembina Chippewa ancestry as passed through her mother’s legacy. Daystar is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and writer. In 1980 she founded her own company Daystar: Contemporary Dance-Drama of Indian America,  now recognized to be the first “native modern dance” company in the USA.  Since then she has created over 30 choreographic works, including the scripted dance-drama No Home But The Heart, and other published writing on contemporary Indigenous dance and theater. She was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2016. Daystar continues to create unique native-based dance theatre and is working on a personal and professional memoir. 

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Kelli Jo Ford:
Crooked Hallelujah

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