Boulevard Craft Interview: Chelsea T. Hicks
from Vol. 39, No. 1
I first became aware of Chelsea Hicks’s debut story collection, A Calm and Normal Heart, because, when someone from your tribe publishes a book, you hear about it. You can’t help it. It’s everywhere you look—in the tribal newspaper, Facebook, Instagram, assorted email newsletters. When that book collects accolades from across the literary world, getting blurbs from giants like Louise Erdrich, and winning the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honor along the way, then it becomes even harder to remain unaware. I follow such announcements eagerly because I feel a responsibility to devour Osage writing as a way to participate in my community however I can, in absentia. What a joy it is, then, when that participation takes the form of story collections such as A Calm and Normal Heart.
Through twelve short stories, Hicks explores the complex and imperfect lives of a diverse cast of contemporary Osage women. These characters not only defy stereotype, they confront it head on. They are simultaneously oppressed and indomitable, fragile yet resilient, vulnerable and fearless all at the same time. Repeatedly, they reminded me of the Osage women in my family, making this book a kind of homecoming. One doesn’t have to be Osage to be captivated by this collection, however. Each of these women navigates the weight of history, individual and tribal, as they seek connection, belonging, and healing. It is that central desire to belong and to do better that makes the collection so universally appealing, even as it makes us uncomfortable. We are all, in one way or another, seeking our place on this earth and in our communities. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Daniel J. Musgrave: Let’s start by asking: What are you working on right now?
Chelsea T. Hicks: Writing-wise? I tend to work on things in seasons. And so, last year I was working on two things: one was a newer piece I’ve been building up the last few years of poetry in Osage, and another one was a novel that I’ve been working on for ten years now. And I’m working at Osage News. I really enjoy just getting to talk to different people and feel like I can kind of have a positive role in using what skills I have.
DJM: How does that journalistic writing influence your more literary work? Is it just being enmeshed in the community and interfacing with folks that has the biggest influence?
CTH: That’s a question that could elicit so many words. In terms of genre, like news writing, I used to be a reporter. I’m interested in learning, especially when it comes to people and finding out how they relate to life. Journalism to me is understanding and connecting to other people, and literary writing is more interior and internal. It’s about getting to know the shadow parts of myself or my family or my experience and then trying to reframe and come to terms with them and bring more wholeness and grace to things I struggle with.
People can get into genre really hard, and I think of it more as a protocol. There are certain conventions in whatever it is you’re writing; you can break those rules as long as you satisfy people’s expectations for what the genre is supposed to be. It’s about holding people’s attention: concision, reduction, compaction. That’s important. I was never good at that. I could learn to do that more.
DJM: What is it like being a writer in a post-Killers-of-the-Flower-Moon- United States? Now that this story is out there for mass consumption and everybody’s started waking up, but . . .
CTH: I hope and I believe that all of the accurate information and all of the awareness has broken through. Whether it was Martin Scorsese, basically in collaboration with the WahZhaZhe people, or other Native writers, from N Scott Momaday to Louise Erdrich, and the many, many writers we have today, whenever they make a publication or a movie or something that’s visible, it results in something being accepted in our structural reality, the PR reality that we agree to, even if it’s not true, which is where the lies about Native people exist that get overturned or corrected.
That context and increased awareness helps editors and publishers be open to other Native people’s stories. That’s how I feel about it at the end of the day. People supposedly know about the word Osage, the people Osage. I mean, it might sound a bit cynical, but—I heard somebody talking on the radio about Killers of the Flower Moon, and the way that they summarized it was like “It’s about murders in Osage County,” and they didn’t even get that this is a Native people, and this is a genocide that was planned and concurrent with the Tulsa Race massacre.
DJM: Right? Does it in any way change how you write? Can you rely on the audience to be just slightly more informed as a result of this bubble, basically?
CTH: Your question makes me think of something I grappled with in 2020. As I mentioned, I’ve been writing a novel for ten years, and so, of course, there come times where you think you’re done. I had sent this novel out, and I was very confident in this book. Editors responded, but it didn’t sell. I had to stop because I thought: They’re trying to communicate their sense of what’s valued by the American public and what will sell. Their comments were mostly that this book assumes people are down. It assumes that people know what you’re talking about. It assumes that people care. And it’s too obscure. People aren’t going to recognize this as “Native American.” It’s set in the 1950s. These people are Christian. And so on.
I wrote this other book, the short story collection, thinking, “I’m going to quit writing after this because I have nothing to say to this world that doesn’t want to hear it. Apparently, they don’t care, so I need to explain everything.” I really wrote the book that way, with that sense of frustration. In my mind, it was direct and kind of confrontational. Like, here it is. Let me explain this to you. I feel like Tommy Orange’s There There had essentially accomplished the idea of “Oh. Native people live in cities”—even if N Scott Mamaday had already done that with House Made of Dawn—and it was almost exclusively focused on that concept of urbanity. I was thinking I just needed to show how Native women aren’t all the same. They’re different at this point in time. They look like these different types.
I felt like I was doing the work of preparing the world to read my work. I thought I could write what I wanted to write, and then it would be published. But no, that’s a privilege I didn’t have. I needed to set it up more because it’s not compatible with the dominant culture’s assumptions and knowledge.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a good litmus test of “Does the market understand or want my book?” I expected that this was going to be good timing, an easy path, and it’s been anything but. I’m just like, “The world’s ready for the Osage?” What a joke! The world’s still not ready, as we saw at the Oscars.
DJM: Right.
CTH: I’m glad Martin Scorsese met with our chief and our people and connected with the story, but I don’t know that his connection was able to touch the whole world the way we might have hoped.
DJM: You see that in the reactions to the film that there’s both positive and negative. Some people are really excited about the murder story, where it’s another crime serial for them, rather than a story of genocide. Other elements, maybe, are tricking people into getting an Osage story and Osage history. And they’re leaving, and they’ve gotten what they wanted from it without seeing it all. You’ve got these layers of resistance. It’s one thing to put it in front of people. It’s another thing to have them see it and empathize and understand at the level that we need.
CTH: Yeah, viewers don’t necessarily have to connect to the Osage as much as they are empowered to do that. I recently went on this Osage cultural historic preservation trip, and what you’re talking about reminds me of this question: How can you empower people who aren’t Native or who don’t have a connection to oppressed histories that they want to identify with? How can you give people from a dominant cultural perspective a chance to connect with Native American cultures in a way that’s not appropriative or oppressive?
DJM: Or performative.
CTH: Or performative, like—
DJM: Land acknowledgments.
CTH: Yeah, I mean, even that. Think of how little of the population on the whole of America is jazzed about that. Like, that’s a sweet little small group, and even that? Yes, we want more—
DJM: Great, you’ve put it in your email signature. Good for you and—
CTH: Awesome, like, I’m glad. I think that’s a good thing. And then, yes, building on that.
DJM: But we’re having to settle for so little.
CTH: No, not settling, right? Building. Using it as a building attitude, not a negotiation of concession. If they can only learn how to connect to land. Not only Native people can do that. Beyond my work, and whatever marketing, I wonder how we can empower this in people who aren’t Native.
When I do book events, people see “Native American women” on the poster or email, and I thought people would be excited. But, in reality, what I received was like, “No, you’re a burden of conscience at best. You’re an unknown category of awkward conversation.” And I’m like, fuck, I did not realize I was in that position. This is so much worse than I thought. That’s been my experience in publishing. I’m trying to be accepting and pragmatic and not focus too much on things outside my control.
DJM: Can we go back to this idea of explaining to readers and having to prepare them for your own work? Are you not feeling like you’re in Erica Wurth’s Fourth Wave of Native fiction [where we can assume and write for a Native audience, and we don’t have to feel the pressure to explain anymore]? It sounds like your novel that isn’t out yet is in that mode, but the story collection is not.
CTH: Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve always gone by Flannery O’Connor’s saying that you need to write for your own community. For me, that was a big question to answer. I think the most important audience for me, and for a lot of writers, is whatever your own community, so to speak, is. But what’s my community, since I am Osage, but I also grew up in this ultra-conservative, evangelical, almost-Christian-Nationalist com- munity? And I don’t consider that latter one my community, but that’s not entirely my choice. I try to write in a way that’s sensitive to people coming from different backgrounds and not by choice. I had this little tweed jacket from a thrift store I would put on. And I would pretend to be this old white man, and I’d read my work in this persona. I wanted my work to be read by the most racist people, and I wanted my work to change them somehow. In the novel, this was all through this teaching of sunk rhetoric, where your true message is undetectable.
But I stopped. I let that go with this short story book. If our literary teaching and assimilation toward literary standards is a pressure cooker trying to bake us into some type of pottery, I just exploded like something broke. I don’t care. I don’t like the literary world at large.
Yes, I do tend to like things that avoid cliche and are deeply interior, and I also like things that are reductive and simple and clear. I’m on trend in some ways with liking what I should, as a literary person, but at the same time, I don’t. For me, that means my rhetoric is out in front like a banner.
DJM: As an Osage writer who is not local to the Nation and hardly present in the community, I’m often paralyzed by feeling a responsibility with my writing to do it the right way. And so, there’s a constant conflict between wanting to do this thing I’m good at in the service of the Nation and not wanting to speak out of turn. Do you feel any kind of internal pressure like that as well?
CTH: I think this has been a path of feedback and correction for me. I participated in the In Lon Schka my entire life, so I didn’t understand that there was a lot more going on all year long that comprises Osage life and community. My family and the camp I help out always welcomed and loved me. I didn’t realize that there can be resentment toward people who have left because they left the responsibility to carry on our culture. People are giving up their lives to carry on our culture.
I started writing this novel when my Iko passed away because I had to. I think when people pass away, something they were holding backfalls to the next generation. I experienced all these feelings of sadness, beyond the grief of missing someone, as an inexplicable darkness. I didn’t know how to deal with it, and the tools that I had at that time were totally related to Christianity and the Bible and prayer, and that wasn’t enough to process generational trauma. You can’t talk back to bad medicine with a different type of medicine. When there’s bad medicine, so to speak, through generational trauma, like the boarding school my Iko attended, when that’s put on you, you can’t fix it using another type of medicine. That’s what I found, anyway, through trial and error. I couldn’t heal through Christianity. I had to heal through culture.
I was going to Native health services, and they said, “You need to practice your culture.” So I just did what they said, and the more I did it, the more I learned. It led me to IAIA. It led me to moving back, to learning our language, and the deeper I went, the message kept being, you need to do more. And it’s not a guilt thing. This way of life is for us to be who we are and be happy. There’s that longing to learn our ways. Come home, Li pi wahko^bra, I want them to come home.
DJM: Let’s discuss language and the choices that you’ve made in the book concerning WahZhaZhe ie, especially given your journey through WahZhaZhe ie as, in some ways, reflected in the stories. I just read a quote by Louise Erdrich: “If you’re not working in your traditional language, you are working in the colonial language, an automatic influence I own the curse and glory of English, a language that has eaten up so many other cultures and become a conglomerate of gorgeous, seedy, supernal, rich, evocative words. There is no purity—that is the great advantage of English.” How does that resonate with you? Does that elicit anything in terms of how you feel about writing this primarily English-language book?
CTH: Oh, my gosh, I wanted to stop writing in English because, at the time of writing that book, I was just so disgusted. I was so broken at the time I was living in Pawhuska and working at the Immersion School. I was thinking about our relationship to English and our need to participate in this economic system. When I started learning our language, this block of my worldview broke a little bit, and my brain reformed to understand this other way of looking at the world. I was just writing everything out of me, releasing a huge amount of everything.
I guess I thought this was my last chance because I hoped to be healed. There is this surrealist idea in Molloy by Samuel Beckett that the greatest achievement of writing would be to say nothing and not to reach the end of your words. I wanted to do that. I wanted to stop writing in English because—I took a class with Yiyun Li, and she’d say, “if you’re writing, it’s cause there’s a problem.” I don’t want to be this person riddled with problems anymore. I want to be somebody who’s living in a better space where I can make the choices to have the best life possible. That’s going to involve this language and being in our community, but I couldn’t do that because I didn’t know Osage well enough.
You mentioned Louise saying, “it’s not a pure language.” It’s funny because, yesterday, I was inside the language department, and I saw this embroidered blanket on the wall printed with the mission of the language department. It said—and I hadn’t read this before—”Our mission is to revitalize language in its purest form.” It’s a focus on purity, and, of course, “purest” implies it’s not going to be perfectly pure. We’ve had these English and French influences for several hundred years and also the concepts and the way we live today isn’t recognizable to the purest form of the language. I think what Louise is saying, applying it beyond just English, is that trying to keep our language pure is good because it preserves it, but it also restricts it to the things that are ancestrally Osage. I can’t access the Osage language the way I want to. That doesn’t mean I’ll stop using it, but I eventually realized I don’t need to be so idealistic and broken that I can’t write in English anymore. I can’t not participate in the dominant culture because there’s a lot of work to do there, and I can be part of that, and that’s what English is for. Going back to the bad medicine thing again, when people put bad medicine on us using English, I’m going to address it back in English.
DJM: Can you talk about the choice to use transliteration instead of the Osage orthography in the book?
CTH: At the time, I actually couldn’t get it to show up on Microsoft Word. I could write with it in Google Docs, but, as a writer, I know you’re always negotiating with editors about those choices. The book I’m writing now is poetry. I’m writing it all in Google Docs, and if I have issues publishing it, I will publish it as a zine. I am not in the concessions- mindset right now. Everyone, get out of our way. I don’t care. Go away. This is our language. I don’t care that it’s hard, and I just don’t care.
But with A Calm and Normal Heart, I was writing it to shake everyone-I-was-mad-at by the collar and say, Listen! With the poetry, I’m not. I’m not so concerned about the non-Osage world. This one is for the language; it’s for the ancestors; it’s for me; it’s for the land; and it’s for our people. It’s to create something for us to read and to have motivation. And it’s for my spirit, too. It’s about the purpose of the publication, and the purpose of A Calm and Normal Heart was to have it read as broadly as possible, to have people ask some questions of themselves. In the end, I thought, as long as I’m clear that we have an orthography, and it’s displayed in the book, and they also understand the barriers to printing it, that’s good for the purposes of this book.
DJM: This is making me think of a panel that I attended at AWP: “Indigenous Stories & Literary Stewardship” with m.s. RedCherries, Stacie Denetsosie, Erin Marie Lynch, Kateri Menominee, and Marisa Tirado. One topic they discussed was the ways that Native writers/writing gets shuffled into poetry as a catch-all. As in, “Well, this doesn’t quite fit our protocols, so it’s poetry, right?” Pushing all these folks using more traditional or non-Western forms of storytelling into a corner. So, are you just calling this poetry because it doesn’t fit the fiction mode? What does it mean to you to say it is poetry?
CTH: I think I’m calling it poetry because I’m speaking in English, and I don’t have a better word. But I like your point because it brings up the poetics of our language, which is the other reason I use the word poetry. Poetics refer to the conventions and the forms. In English, we have sonnets, villanelle, novel, short story, novella. On and on. These are forms that have become normalized in English literature.
Indigenous poetics are different; they’re their own universe. That’s also really broad, like you were saying. I got this challenge from these poets in Oaxaca, Indigenous poets writing Nahua, Zapotec, and other languages that all have different normalized poetic forms and conventions. I’m studying and focusing on WahZhaZhe in an appropriate manner with the appropriate context: the form of our old rituals, our contemporary prayers, our songs, traditional and contemporary art—the way people orate. I want to create just one person’s interpretation of a contemporary WahZhaZhe poetics coming out of these forms. WahZhaZhe ei, itself, is inherently poetic. Certain words can be used for different things. Wah-leh-zeh is supposed to mean “writing” and “book,” and it does, but it also means “markings” and “pattern.” It means “painting” as well as “photograph.” So, I’m writing a book; I’m making a little essay. Then, the absurdist in me says, this book is going to have very little essay in it, and its poetics will all come from our oral traditions. Putting it in an English book is a hybridized, contemporary, postcolonial thing, and I’m calling it poetry because I think that’s what the soul of poetry is: to interpret the ineffable and to do it in a way that touches mystery.
Poetry is not the best word, but at the same time, I love that word for it.
DJM: It’s one thing for other people to tell you it’s poetry. It’s another thing for you to consciously choose that. Do you read your reviews at all? Not the Kirkus kind, but from the people.
CTH: I do. I want to know what people think I want to learn from them. I can learn something from everything in life.
DJM: One caught me, and I want to know how it resonates. They’ve summed up your book very succinctly as: “It’s young Osage women in unhealthy relationships where both parties are dealing with past cultural trauma.” That’s it. So, I wondered, how is that the book? And how is that not the book?
CTH: It is the book, for sure. How is it not the book? I don’t know.
DJM: One sentence seems pretty minimal for something that took so much of your life and energy.
CTH: I like reductive summary. It’s part of my aesthetic. The funniest review I’ve received was just as short, something like, “I would have enjoyed this more if I could have discussed it with other people.” That’s so funny. They just mainly commented on their failure to access a book club.
DJM: Ah yes, the “Does-this-serve-my-social-status?” Review.
CTH: Yeah, like, how is it more than just Native people negotiating their past cultural trauma? That’s one of the questions I’m asking right now because I’ve really enjoyed participating in more traditional things and, in the question of healing, how it’s done, what it means for people, broadly, as well as Native people, and these different manifestations of trauma because everybody has trauma. For Native people, it’s just very recent and extreme, and we’re still in this position of structural oppression. Tommy Orange’s new book, Wandering Stars, discusses how that can be resolved or not resolved. I won’t ruin the ending of that book for anybody who hasn’t read it, but I was surprised by his answer that, basically, you can’t heal it per se, but you can find medicines that are functional.
My book didn’t go as far into functional medicines. It was more about the cause. I was also thinking I wanted this book to problematize disconnection, to problematize not having support and being away. How are people going to come home unless they first think that not coming home doesn’t work? That was what I experienced, so that’s what I wanted to share. Maybe that person said it that way because it wasn’t their jam, and I, as a reader, really appreciate that.
DJM: One of the women recurrently brought up in reader responses is Florence. She seems to get a really strong reaction one way or the other. Do you have any insight as to why?
CTH: She’s the one in my novel! Though I don’t repeat any of those stories in the book. I have this obsession with modularity. I tried to write all of the chapters in the novel to function like short stories to a point because, today, the way we read, we might be more distracted and have to put things down. Also, I just think it’s more polite to have everything complete unto themselves, so it’s easier to read.
I have Florence’s story with different words, with different events modularly in the novel, and I’m very passionate about it. But I think the reason she sits so poorly with people is because she is abusive. Now, I hate to see an abusive person used as a literary trope. I think it’s overdone. It’s like Dostoyevsky. Can we move on from trying to have empathy for abusive people? But she’s oppressed, and she’s someone who became an abuser out of being abused. And she’s trying, and I’m trying.
My goal is to help her heal and examine: How can she do her best? And can this family be saved? The stakes are high, and’s upsetting for people. It makes me so glad people react that way to her because I think it is that way. Like, “Yeah, you love your abusive mom, but she is also the devil.”
DJM: There’s a lot of metaphorical resonance there, too, about someone having power over you that you both abhor and resent but also can’t escape and love at the same time. I feel like Native peoples’ relationship to the United States as a political entity is often that same complicated mess, right?
CTH: I like that as a book idea, or maybe I want to read that essay? My perspective on us coming together inside this country is that everybody needs to rematriate. People are becoming more abusive of land and each other because they haven’t healed, in some cases, 8,000-year-old-trauma, and, at some point in the past 2,000 years, they were removed. They lost their indigeneity. This isn’t about white people getting reparations. This is about healing. This is about responsibility. And this is about land protection. And this is about life.
DJM: There’s this one quote that has stayed with me forever about the old Osage way of thinking. An elder was being interviewed by Francis La Flesche, an anthropologist and Omaha Indian, and he said, “If you look into the night sky, nothing in the cosmos moves backwards,” (1) encapsulating the fact that we move forward, we carry on. And I was particularly struck by this and how central it was to us as a people being removed five, six times in a hundred-year span. But as writers, we move forward, but we still have to think back, try to excavate that past, and sometimes our whole lives. I sometimes feel like I’m a star trying to move backward in the night. Do you struggle with that in the same way? How do you dig into the past and yourself, trying to find something to explore and understand?
CTH: Well, so No^ho^zhika [Little Old Men] have that saying, everything goes forward, and as the sun rises, every day we are reborn. Our stories guide us forward. In moving forward, we orient ourselves by the stars. I’ve had to accept that more as a writer, to look back and excavate, but only take what is brought to me through ancestors or spirits and through my process and through the invisible world. What comes to me is meant for now.
Some people will say that the Jesuits brought us the Bible, and it does have good things in it. It was the stack of leaves with a new moral code, and we put away our old culture because our old culture was organized around death and cycles, and it was only going to bring death to our people, and that’s why we have to move forward. And so, if that’s true, you know, the Bible says there’s nothing new under the sun . . .
We make things out of what we have, and sometimes that’s old stuff, and we make something new out of it. There’s a tension there, but I think that I put the focus on trying to renew myself. The bad things that happened to me? Let them go and try to break a pattern. In some ways, I’m not as focused on writing. I’m focused on living. Writing is just a way of grappling with spiritual development, personal development, and cultural information. It’s just a place to work things out when’s needed.
DJM: We’re talking today for Boulevard magazine out of St. Louis, one of several literary magazines and publications that are coming out of what is Osage land, right? I think it behooves us to ask how these journals can respect and honor that land. Do you have a wish list, essentially?
CTH: Citizens of St. Louis, Missouri, can learn about rematriation and think about ways to repair the deconstructing and excavation of our mounds, and the looting of our graves, and the lack of respect for the NAGPRA Act, which is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Also, if they have respect for our people and our ways, they can visit still existing sacred sites such as Washington State Park and Cahokia and benefit from praying there, or mindfully being present there. For Osage people walking around in St. Louis, a part of their culture has been annihilated and desecrated. The people who did that obviously experienced their own cultural annihilation at some point, and they carried that violence on to us. So, I encourage people to learn about their ancestral continents, and the plants that grow indigenously there, and to visit those waters if they can, and pray about it. Because I think we can agree that we’re experiencing large-scale disasters related to mismanagement of the earth, which is a part of our bodies.
From a Christian perspective, if people are coming from that type of worldview, that would be called mis-stewardship. Abuse of resources, such as our land and water, which has not been and is not being cared for. And we do want, as people, to engage in earth-protection. People just don’t know how, or sometimes why, to do that. We must restore our sense of responsibility to Earth and recognize our bodies are Earth. I think that people should humbly—if they can grasp it—pray, and be out in nature, and spend time with water, and ask for steps toward that rematriation, and ask for ways we can protect Earth, wherever we are. And I do think it’s good to read books by Osages and watch Osage movies or watch Killers of the Flower Moon. Education is always good, but I think people get confused like, “What are we supposed to do with this?” And you can actually help. There are opportunities to learn about where these Osage sites were and see what’s happened to them. Know about yourself and how that connects to you. Become more aware of the order of things emerging out of the earth, rather than engaging in ongoing colonization.
DJM: Amen. Lastly, I think about holding the door open for those who come next. Do you have anyone you want to promote or draw people’s attention to? Or any inspirations you want to make readers aware of?
CTH: Mateo Askaripour has a new book out called This Great Hemisphere, and I’m excited to read it. There is a writer that I really like, Nicola Andrews, and they have a new chapbook out called Māori Maid Difficult, and there is some Indigenous language in there. And this new American Fiction movie. I haven’t seen it yet, but as I understand, this movie, American Fiction, follows a Black writer who’s trying to write a book, and he finds that the stereotypes pervading his community are the only thing people want to reward. I noticed that in Native literature. Those topics of the stereotypes surrounding Natives are the most successful, and I don’t know what to do about that.
I did this news piece on the community response to Killers of the Flower Moon losing all ten Oscars it was nominated for, and Cecilia Tallchief said my favorite quote: “I do not think the world is ready for the First Americans.” I really feel that. Maybe people should ask, what can we do to help everyone belong?
1. La Flesche, Francis, “The Osage Trive: Rite of Wa-xo'-be,” Forty-fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethology, 1927–28, (1930): 523–833.
Chelsea T. Hicks is the author of A Calm & Normal Heart (The Unnamed Press, 2022), for which she was named a 5 Under 35 Honoree by the National Book Foundation, and which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MA from the University of California, Davis, and is enrolled Osage, of Pawhuska District and the Half-Breed Band. She lives in Oklahoma, where she is a reporter for Osage News and a PhD candidate in Indigenous Language Creative Writing at the University of Oklahoma.
Daniel J. Musgrave was raised by animals in rural Kansas. He holds an MFA from the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and his writing has earned recognition from the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Iceland Writers Retreat, Best American Science and Nature Writing, and elsewhere. Having just completed a memoir manuscript, he intends to turn his attention to fiction concerning survivance and Indigenous futurism. He is a citizen of the Osage Nation, and he can be found online at danmusgrave.com.