Linda Hogan Extended Biography

 Internationally recognized for her poetry, fiction, and essays, Linda Hogan’s lyrical work illuminates a new environmental and indigenous activism as well as Native spirituality. A member of the Chickasaw Nation and a former faculty member at the Indian Arts Institute, she is Professor Emerita at the University of Colorado. Her works include the novels Mean Spirit (Norton, 1991), a winner of the Oklahoma Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Solar Storms (Norton, 1997), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Power (Norton, 1999); and People of the Whale (Norton, 2009).  In poetry, The Book of Medicines (Coffee House Press, 1993) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other poetry has received the Colorado Book Award, an American Book Award, and a prestigious Lannan Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. In addition, she has received a NEA fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. Her most recent awards were the 2016 Thoreau Prize from PEN and a Native Arts and Culture Award.

Hogan’s nonfiction includes the acclaimed collection of essays Dwellings, A Spiritual History of the Land (Norton, 2007) and The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (Norton, 2002). In addition she has, with Brenda Peterson, written Sightings: The Gray Whale’s Mysterious Journey (2003) for National Geographic books and edited several anthologies on nature and spirituality.  She wrote the script Everything has a Spirit, a PBS documentary on American Indian religious freedom. Hogan was inducted into the Chickasaw Nation Hall of Fame in 2007 for her writing and contributions to indigenous literatures, and she is currently on the board of advisors for Orion magazine.

Hogan’s new and selected poems, Dark. Sweet. (Coffee House Press) was published in 2014, and she has recently finished a new poetry collection, A History of Happiness, as well as the novel The Mercy Liars.  She is currently completing a book of essays titled The Radiant Life of Animals, the title taken from her chapter on traditional indigenous knowledge and animals in a collection on traditional ecological knowledge forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Hogan was involved for 18 years with the Native Science Dialogues and the new Native American Academy and for several more years with the SEED graduate Institute in Albuquerque. In April 2014 Hogan was one of the writers adding to the 200 year-old record of the Andrews long-term research site in the forest near Corvallis, Oregon, a collaboration between scientists and artists, which at this time continues to influence her writing. Hogan has worked with “at-risk” teens in various places, including the Chickasaw Children’s Home.