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.”