Robert Conley
Activity Sheet

Biography from Storytellers and Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers
Robert J. Conley, Cherokee, was born in Cushing, Oklahoma, in 1940. After finishing high school in Wichita Falls, Texas, he attended college there at Midwestern University where he received his bachelor's degree in drama in 1966 and his master's in English in 1968.
An accomplished teacher and writer, Robert has published nearly forty novels, beginning with his first book, Back to Malachi. He is also a noted poet and short story author and received critical acclaim for his collection, The Witch of Goingsnake and Other Stories. Most of his writing deals with Cherokee characters, Cherokee culture, and Cherokee themes. His Real-People series traces Cherokee history, beginning in the year 1500. The most recent novels in that series are The Peace Chief and War Woman.
His novel, Mountain Windsong, focuses on the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee removal from Georgia to Oklahoma. Author Tony Hillerman writes that the book "deserves to become an American classic. Conley takes the grim facts of our 'manifest destiny' and makes them come alive in a novel, which is beautiful and heartwarming as well as tragic." Mountain Windsong has recently been adapted into a musical.
His poems and short stories have been published in numerous periodicals and anthologies over the years, including some in Germany, France, Belgium, New Zealand, and Yugoslavia. His poems have been published in English, Cherokee, German, French and Macedonian versions.
In 1997 Conley was inducted into the Oklahoma Professional Writers Hall of Fame. He is an enrolled member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma. He now lives in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the historic capital of the Cherokee Nation, with his wife, Evelyn, where he writes full time. Conley is the author of more than 30 novels, including the ten that comprise his acclaimed Real People Saga. He is the winner of three Spur Awards for his work.

Cherokee Dragon
Book Description from amazon.com
Acclaimed novelist Robert J. Conley once again mines the history of his people, the Cherokee. In a fascinating and compelling novel, he explores the life of Dragging Canoe, the last great war chief of the united Cherokee tribe. In the late eighteenth century, as the English settlers begin steadily encroaching upon the Cherokee lands, the Nation -- split up amongst several towns and many chiefs -- unites in a series of battles under the war chief Dragging Canoe. But the united front is not one that lasts: Dragging Canoe's belief that they must fight the settlers to preserve their lands and their culture is far from universal. As strife wracks the Cherokee nation and the settlers begin to rebel against the English government, Dragging Canoe's fight -- and the fight of his followers.

Mountain Windsong
Book Description from amazon.com
Using four different techniques and perspectives, Robert Conley draws you into the tragic story of the Trail of Tears. Although ultimately the legendary lovers do not meet horrible ends, with the switches between grandfather and grandson, the legal documents drawn by the U.S. government, a song and the romantic story of two perhaps fictional Native Americans torn apart by the Trail of Tears, the book is impossible to put down. Both heart-wrenching and heart-warming!

Home Page at Storytellers
http://www.hanksville.org/storytellers/conley/