“Kelli Jo Ford’s Crooked Hallelujah masterfully evokes loss and displacement, steeped in Native American culture, rife with compassion and deep understanding. Kelli Jo Ford is a powerful new Native American writer who writes beautifully with stunning prose! She is brilliant, and I can’t wait for people to read her amazing book.”—Brandon Hobson, 2018 National Book Award Finalist and author of Where the Dead Sit Talking

It’s 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women, presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine’s father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church — a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But Justine does her best as a devoted daughter, until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever.

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. However, life in Texas isn’t easy, 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, like wildfires and tornados—intent on stripping away their connections to one another and their very ideas of home.

In lush and empathic prose, Kelli Jo Ford depicts what this family of proud, stubborn, Cherokee women sacrifice for those they love, amid larger forces of history, religion, class, and culture. This is a big-hearted and ambitious novel of the powerful bonds between mothers and daughters by an exquisite and rare new talent.

Kelli Jo Ford is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, a Katherine Bakeless Nason Award at Bread Loaf, a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, VQR, and the Missouri Review, among other places. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

Erika T. Wurth’s publications include two novels, two collections of poetry and a collection of short stories. A writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, she teaches creative writing at Western Illinois University and was a guest writer at IAIA. Her work has appeared/ is forthcoming in journals including Buzzfeed, Boulevard, The Writer’s Chronicle, Waxwing and The Kenyon Review. She’ll be faculty at Breadloaf in 2020, is a Kenyon Review Writers Scholar, attended the Tin House Summer Workshop, and has been chosen as a narrative artist for the Meow Wolf Denver installation. She is Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee and was raised outside of Denver.

Kelli Jo Ford on Crooked Hallelujah with Erika T. Wurth