Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial.

Ford joins us for a chat about her first novel, a remarkable debut that follows four generations of Cherokee women across four decades. She’ll be in conversation with Bowell Book Company’s proprietor Daniel Goldin.

This event will be broadcast via Zoom, and registration is required.

Ford’s debut has earned starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly, which says “Ford’s storytelling is urgent, her characters achingly human and complex, and her language glittering and rugged. This is a stunner.”

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. In lush and empathic prose, Kelli Jo Ford depicts what this family of proud, stubborn, Cherokee women sacrifices 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.

Purchase your copy at:
https://www.boswellbooks.com/book/9780802149121