Mark Allen Everett Poetry Series

Wendy Barnes is currently Visiting Artist-in-Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma. Her poetry has appeared in publications like Narrative, storySouth, Painted Bride Quarterly, No, Dear, Spoon River Review, Slice Magazine, and Coldfront. Her art and poetry reviews appear in Frog magazine and on The Adroit Journal blog. Her forthcoming book, Landscape with Bloodfeud, was a finalist for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and was awarded the Juniper Prize for Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Press. She received a 2022 Fellowship in Prose from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Julie Ezelle Patton is a permaculturist, poet, performer, artist, and sculptor. Her poetics take the form of scrolls, extended texts, limited edition work, performances, and site-specific installations.

Patton's performance work emphasizes improvisation, collaboration, and otherworldly chora-graphs, and bridges literary and musical composition. She has performed at many international venues and festivals. Patton is also a frequent collaborator with choreographers, poets, filmmakers, and composers including Uri Caine, Henry Hills, Don Byron, Henri Grimes, Sally Silvers, and Anne Waldman. Patton is the author of Teething on Type (1996), A Garden Per Verse (or What Else do You Expect from Dirt?) (1999), Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake (2007), and Using Blue To Get Black (2008), B (Tender Buttons Press, 2015), and Writing With Crooked Ink (Belladonna, 2015). Prior to receiving her 2015 Grants to Artists award, Patton received the 1993 New York City Arts-in-Education Roundtable Award for Sustained Achievement in Poetry. She was also the recipient of a 2006 Mellon Learning Fellowship and a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. She was a 2007 National Poetry Series Finalist, and received a 2008 Acadia Arts Foundation Grant and the Doan Brook Association's 2012 Watershed Hero Award.

She has taught at Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Learning Thru Art at the Guggenheim Museum, the Studio In a School Program at New York University, Case Western University, Naropa University, and Schule fur Dichtung in Vienna, Austria. Patton received her B.F.A. from Antioch College in 1979.

Lewis Freedman is the author of Residual Synonyms for the Name of God and I Want Something Other Than Time (both from Ugly Duckling Presse) as well as many chapbooks of poetry, including Am Perhaps Yet (Oxeye). In addition, he has authored several experiments on the form of the book including Solitude: The Complete Games (Troll Thread), a collaboration with Kevin Rydberg that will take several years for your computer to read, and the book within a book, Hold the Blue Orb, Baby (Well-Greased Press) which interleaves notebook facsimiles with poems on the practice of notebooking. He has taught creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Oklahoma State University, and served as Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Carthage College.

To commemorate and celebrate the research accessibility of the LeAnne Howe Collection at the Western History Collections (WHC), the University Libraries (UL) is hosting a special event. In August of 2019, Howe was the first author to donate to the Native American Authors Collection, a new special collections initiative at WHC focusing on the distinctiveness of Native creativity in and around Oklahoma, the Southern Plains, and the American West.

LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) is an award-winning author of poetry, fiction, drama, creative non-fiction, and documentaries. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies, leading literary journals, and by many notable presses across the country. Please join us to celebrate her work and legacy.

The evening will include a presentation by Dr. Joshua Nelson on the documentary Searching for Sequoyah; a poetry reading by LeAnne Howe; and a Q&A.

Following the Celevent!, there will be a reception at the Blackbird
Gastropub to continue the conversation and festivities. Light refreshments and drinks will be available.

Gather with us in Beaird Lounge in the OU Memorial Union on Thursday, April 28th at 7:00 p.m. --to witness the production of Gregory Hinton's play "MORE SKY! The Story of Lynn Riggs." Osage writer and dancer Russ Tallchief plays Lynn Riggs in this one-man show.

This event is co-sponsored by the Mark Allen Everett Poetry Series and by the OU University Libraries.

A commissioned solo play in two acts, MORE SKY tells the story of Lynn Riggs (1899-1954), Oklahoma’s forgotten Cherokee poet and playwright whose folk-play; GREEN GROW THE LILACS (1931) was adapted into the great Rodgers and Hammerstein musical drama OKLAHOMA! (1943) and changed musical theatre forever.

Directed by Pat Hobbs, More Sky received its World Premiere at OKEQ's Lynn Riggs Theatre in Tulsa, OK, Sept. 17th, 2020.

Gregory Hinton is an author, historian, and keynote lecturer. Hinton’s work explores diverse cultural themes and how they relate to the  community-at-large. A son of the rural Rocky Mountain West, Hinton devotes his energies to Out West™, his national museum program series offering lectures, films, plays and gallery exhibitions dedicated to shining a light on LGBTQ history and culture in the American West. Hinton holds residencies at Wyoming’s Ucross Foundation, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, and is Associate Editor of the Papers of William F. Cody. A founding director of the Gay & Lesbian Rodeo Heritage Foundation, Hinton is the 2017 recipient of its Paladin Award; the 2010 International Gay Rodeo Associations President’s Award, and served as Honorary Grand Marshal of the 25th Anniversary of World Gay Rodeo. Among his many endeavors, Hinton is proud to have initiated the display of the iconic intertwined shirts from Brokeback Mountain in the film gallery of the Autry Museum of the American West; Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art’s traveling exhibition of "Blake Little: Photos from the Gay Rodeo; and “Out West in the Rockies”, the first regional archive of LGBTQ western history and culture at the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center in Laramie.

Russ Tallchief is an Osage actor, writer, dancer, and teacher. Last year, Tallchief was cast in Gregory Hinton's one-man show "More Sky," based on the life of Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs, which he performed at the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center in the Pride District of Tulsa. Tallchief is honored to reprise the role and particularly proud to perform at the University of Oklahoma where Lynn Riggs studied. This past summer, Tallchief appeared in a dance scene in the film "Killers of the Flower Moon," directed by Martin Scorcese. Tallchief's creative emphasis is in indigenous theatre, and he especially enjoys supporting fellow writers as they develop new plays. While performing in Cherokee playwright Vicki Mooney's "Hoop Jumper" in 2015, his daughter Lilyanna Rose was born. Tallchief can also be seen in the film "Lord Finn/Native Hearts" by Al Mertens, which was shot entirely in Oklahoma.

Last year, Tallchief finished his MFA in Creative Writing at Oklahoma City University's Red Earth Writing Program. During the program, he had the opportunity to work with Todd Fuller, Curator of the Western History Collections, who is graciously hosting this event. During a playwriting semester with the respected writer Kat Meads, Tallchief worked on his original play "The Chainsaw Artist," which originally premiered in 2017 at Earth Rebirth, a nonprofit in Norman. The play was performed the following year at the Constantine Theater in Pawhuska, where the play is set. Tallchief’s play "Jacobson and the Kiowa Five," previously titled "Jacobson House 1930," evolved out of improvised performance art pieces Tallchief directed at the Jacobson House Native Art Center. They play chronicles the lives of Oscar Jacobson, the founder of OU's Art School (in 1915), along with his wife Sophie Brousse, as they welcome a group of young, Kiowa artists, as the first indigenous artists-in-residence at OU in 1917. From 2000 - 2015, Russ served as Art Galleries Editor for Native Peoples Magazine. He has taught writing at various colleges throughout Oklahoma City.

As a Southern Straight style dancer, Tallchief serves as Taildancer for the Grayhorse District of the Osage Nation. He was a featured dancer in the touring exhibition “Dance! American Art, 1830 – 1960,” curated by the Detroit Institute of Arts, during which he performed at the host venues for the exhibition, including the Denver Art Museum and Crystal Bridges. He has danced throughout Oklahoma, as well as in New York, at the Grand Palais in Paris, as well as at the Centre for American Arts and Orenda Gallery in Paris.

From 2014 - 2021, Tallchief served as director of Student Diversity and Inclusion at Oklahoma City University. He currently teaches English at Mustang High School as a long-term substitute teacher, answering the urgent call during Covid. His teaching experience on the college level did not prepare him in the slightest for the energy level of high school. But while he teaches English to the students, the students teach him how to loosen up and roll with the flow.