Fred Ewing Case and Lola Case Writer-in-Residence

MACOMB, IL -- The Western Illinois University Department of English will host the Fred Ewing Case and Lola Case Writer-in-Residence Friday, April 29 in Sherman Hall's third-floor auditorium.

This year's writer is Kelli Jo Ford. A question-and-answer session with Ford will begin at 3 p.m., and a reading will begin at 5 p.m.

Ford's debut novel-in-stories, Crooked Hallelujah, includes stories about four generations of Cherokee women.

She is also a teacher of fiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA program in Santa Fe, NM, as well as a freelance writer and editor.

One story from Ford's novel, "Hybrid Vigor," won The Paris Review's 2019 Plimpton Prize and her manuscript won the University of Central Oklahoma's 2019 Everett Southwest Literary Award. She been awarded an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, an Elizabeth George Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship and a Katharine Bakeless Nason Award in Fiction by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. In 2016, she was the Indigenous Writer-in-Residence at School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM.

In addition to her novel, Ford has work either published or preparing work for publication in The Paris Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney's Quarterly and The Missouri Review.

Ford, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, lives in Virginia with her husband, poet Scott Weaver, and her daughter, Cypress.

The series is sponsored by the WIU Department of English, the Fred Ewing Case and Lola Austin Case Writer-in-Residence program and the WIU College of Arts and Sciences.

The Fred Ewing Case and Lola Austin Case Writer-in-Residence supports bringing national writers of poetry and fiction to WIU each year.