Authors: Linda Hogan

Hogan grew up with a rich oral tradition. Her father’s lively stories later became key sources for her poems and fictions, and the knowledge of American Indians’ dislocation and disinheritance became the basis of her politics.

At the age of fifteen Hogan started working full-time. For the next ten years she did odd jobs ranging from a position as dental assistant to work as a cocktail waitress. In 1973 she received a B.A. in psychology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. When she was in her late twenties, Hogan moved to the Washington, D.C., area and worked as a teacher’s aid with orthopedically handicapped students. During her free time she began to write. When, soon after, she discovered the work of Kenneth Rexroth and James Wright, she was inspired to start writing poetry.

After studying with the poet Rod Jellema, Hogan entered a graduate program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and in 1978 she received an M.A. in creative writing. That same year she bought her home in Idledale, a small village in the Colorado mountains, where she moved with her two adopted daughters, Sandra Dawn Protector and Tanya Thunder Horse, both Oglala Lakota.

Also in 1978 Hogan’s first book appeared, Calling Myself Home, a collection of poems inspired by her Oklahoma experiences and by the tensions between her white and Indian heritages. Although the work received scant critical attention, Calling Myself Home did establish Hogan as a poet of merit.

From 1978 until 1984 Hogan held a variety of creative-writing teaching positions in the Denver region; she taught at Colorado Springs’ Colorado Colleges Institute, and she was writer-in-residence at several Colorado and Oklahoma high schools.

During this time she published two further poetry volumes, Daughters, I Love You and Eclipse, and Oklahoma State University at Stillwater produced her play, A Piece of Moon. In Daughters, I Love You, Hogan focuses on the horrors of atomic war and the tragic destruction of American Indian culture. The play A Piece of Moon deals with the occupation at Wounded Knee in the early 1970’s. Eclipse also reflects Hogan’s American Indian political concerns, but in this work she also begins to pursue her central fascination with mystical and ecological themes.

These three works brought Hogan wider critical attention. A Piece of Moon was awarded the Five Civilized Tribes Museum Playwriting Award, and Eclipse won an honorable mention in the Western States Book Awards.

From 1984 to 1988 Hogan taught American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. This locale provided the inspiration and setting for her later novel Solar Storms. During this time she also began her work on raptor restoration, and she published her first short-story collection, That Horse, in which she reworks her father’s oral narratives and her Oklahoma childhood memories. Hogan also continued writing poetry, collected in Seeing Through the Sun and Savings. In these works Hogan reveals the connections between her American Indian worldview and the universal, perennial concerns of family, alienation, ecology, and mythology. She also explores the complementary nature of American Indian spirituality and politics.

Her writings met with increasing critical success and honors that included a National Endowment for the Arts award and a Pushcart Prize; Seeing Through the Sun was awarded the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

In 1989 Hogan returned to the University of Colorado, Boulder, as an associate professor in English. A year later she published her first novel, Mean Spirit, which is set in the 1920’s during the Oklahoma oil boom on Osage land. The Osage suddenly find themselves a target of envy and greed; through a series of murders and legal assaults they are uprooted from their ancestral lands. Mean Spirit won the Oklahoma Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Hogan next published Red Clay, a reprinting of earlier work, and The Book of Medicines, a collection of spare, imagistic poetry in which she examined the world of darkness and suffering and the healing power of nature and Indian spirituality. The Book of Medicines received the Colorado Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Hogan’s next novel, Solar Storms, centers on a young woman of Cree ancestry who searches the Canadian border region to find her lost family; as a result she becomes embroiled in a battle against a hydroelectric dam that would destroy her people’s far northern homelands. Concurrently with this novel Hogan published the collection of essays Dwellings. In this work, set primarily near Hogan’s Idledale home, the writer explores the centrality of nature and the American Indian reverence for the earth. Both books received strong reviews, and praise from such authors as Terry Tempest Williams, Barbara Kingsolver, and Sherman Alexie.

Power, which was published in 1998, is a coming-of-age story of a Taiga girl named Omishto, who witnesses her spiritual mentor kill a panther, a sacred animal, and must learn the uses and abuses of spiritual power.

In 2008, Hogan published her first volume of poetry in fifteen years, Rounding the Human Corners; the poems focused on the interconnection between living beings. She followed this with the novel People of the Whale (2009), about a Native American man's experiences in the Vietnam War. Also in 2009, Hogan's theatrical work Lowak Shoppalá premiered at East Central University's Ataloa Theatre in Ada, Oklahoma; the performance incorporates traditional Chickasaw storytelling, music, and dance.

Indios, a narrative poem about a Native woman who is seduced and abused by a white man, was published in 2012, followed by Dark. Sweet. New and Selected Poems, which provides a broad overview of Hogan's work, in 2014.

Hogan’s memoir, The Woman Who Watches Over the World, the writer makes clear the connections she sees between life, myth, and spirituality.