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RIVERSIDE, Calif. (www.ucr.edu) -- LeAnne Howe, a novelist, filmmaker, short story writer, playwright, literary critic, and poet is visiting UC Riverside as a Regents' Lecturer this quarter. She will be delivering two public lectures during her visit, sponsored by the Department of English: "Tribalography: The Story of America" 5:30 p.m. Thursday, March 11, in the English Department Conference Room (HMNSS 2212; and "Tribalism in Space: The Journey Continues," 4 p.m. Monday, March 15, in the English Department Conference Room (HMNSS 2212).

The Regents’ Lecturer position is offered to persons of distinguished accomplishment who, through their contact with students and faculty, may enrich University life. Parking on campus is $6 per vehicle for the day or may be purchased for shorter periods at $2 per hour. Parking permits are available at the information kiosks near the University Avenue and the Canyon Crest Drive and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard entrances.

“Ms. Howe is arguably one of the most important living writers whose work centers on Native American themes,” said Michelle Raheja, the UCR professor of English who nominated Howe as Regents’ Lecturer. “Her work covers such a range of genres and interests -- poetry, fiction, film, politics, theater, history -- that she will appeal to a multi-disciplinary audience.”

Howe started working at small newspapers in Texas, later moving to the Dallas Morning News. When her two sons were teenagers, she went to work for a Wall Street securities firm and traveled regularly to New York City from her home in Texas. She has taught at Grinnell College, Carleton College, Sinte Gleska University, and was a lecturer at the University of Iowa. She obtained her MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College in 2000. She was the Louis D. Rubin Writer in Residence in the 2003 Spring semester in the English department at Hollins University in Roanoke Virginia. Howe is currently affiliated with the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Howe's work has appeared in numerous journals and scholarly publications, including Clearing a Path: Theorizing Native American Studies, Callaloo, Cimarron Review, and Fiction International. Her first novel, Shell Shaker, won the 2002 American Book Award and the Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year Award. "Native Americans in the 21st Century," a PBS documentary on which Howe served as screenwriter and narrator, will also be released next fall.

Howe, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, is working on her second novel Miko Kings, a novel set in Indian Territory's Queen City, Ada in 1903, and simultaneously in 1969 during the Vietnam War.The story centers on Hope Little Leader, a Choctaw pitcher for the Miko Kings baseball team; Lucius Mummy, a switch hitter; and Ezol Daggs, the postal clerk in Indian Territory who tries to patent her Choctaw theory of relativity and inadvertently changes the course of history for the Indians and their baseball team. "This is where the twentieth-century Indian really began," says Hope, "not in the abstractions of Congressional acts -- but on the prairie diamond."

UC Riverside is near neighbor to more than 30 federally recognized tribes and California Indians helped found the campus and established its first academic chair. The campus offers one of only two Ph.D. programs in American Indian History in the nation, and was the first university in the nation to offer a Ph.D. program in dance history. Other institutional resources include the Rupert Costo Library of American Indian History, one of the largest collections of research materials relating to Native Americans in the nation, and the proposed Center for California Native Nations.

For more information, contact Michelle H. Raheja at
michelle.raheja@ucr.edu

The University of California, Riverside (www.ucr.edu) is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment has exceeded 20,500 students. The campus will open a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual statewide economic impact of more than $1 billion.

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