Kelli Jo Ford’s Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of four generations of Cherokee women, and their struggle as mothers and daughters to hold on to their connections to one another and their very ideas of home. She’s speaking with There There author Tommy Orange, whose own exploration of Native Americans in search of identity and meaning was shortlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
Kelli Jo Ford on Crooked Hallelujah
Kelli Jo Ford on Crooked Hallelujah
Author:
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Tommy Orange
Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California. Tommy Orange’s novel There There (Vintage) follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American—grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable. Margaret Atwood called it “An astonishing literary debut.”
Kelli Jo Ford
Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, among other places. Crooked Hallelujah (Grove Press) is Ford’s novel-in-stories about four generations of Cherokee women. 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. Justine does her best, but then 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 to Texas in the hope of starting a new, more stable life. However, life in Texas isn’t easy, and they struggle to survive in a world of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces. Publishers Weekly in a starred review, called “Ford’s storytelling is urgent, her characters achingly human and complex, and her language glittering and rugged. This is a stunner.”
