Education
PhD, University of Oklahoma
MA, University of Colorado
BA, Haverford College
Professor Snyder enjoys helping students become better writers, readers, and critical thinkers. He is the first biographer of the great but underrated twentieth century American novelist, storywriter, playwright, and poet, James Purdy, who was a gay man. Snyder’s book John Joseph Mathews: Life of an Osage Writer was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in hardcover (2017) and in paperback (2018). An Oklahoma bestseller for several weeks according to The Oklahoman, the biography earned praise from the Times Literary Supplement of London, the Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion, and was nominated for an Oklahoma Book Award in nonfiction. His second book, Our Osage Hills, praised by the Osage News, collects lost writings by John Joseph Mathews and interweaves them with his own contextual essays dealing with ecology, politics, culture, art, film, sport, land loss, and murder. Our Osage Hills was published by Lehigh University Press / Rowman & Littlefield in hardcover (2020) and in paperback (2022). Snyder has published many articles of literary and cultural criticism in peer-reviewed academic journals and in three book collections. His scholarship has focused on Mathews, Ojibwe author and critic Gerald Vizenor, and Choctaw author LeAnne Howe, along with non-Native gay authors such as Tennessee Williams and James Leo Herlihy. Snyder’s poetry has appeared in several literary magazines and the book Ain’t Nobody That Can Sing Like Me: New Oklahoma Writing (Mongrel Empire Press). He is writing a novel.
Selected Publications
Books
James Purdy: Life of a Contrarian Writer (Oxford University Press, hardcover October 2022)
Our Osage Hills: Toward an Osage Ecology and Tribalography of the Twentieth Century. Forewords by Harvey Payne and Russ Tall Chief. Lehigh University Press/Rowman & Littlefield), hardcover 2020, paperback 2022.
John Joseph Mathews: Life of an Osage Writer. Foreword by Russ Tall Chief. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, hardcover 2017, paperback 2018.
Book Chapters
“Becoming James Purdy: The ‘New’ Stories in The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy.” MidAmerica, the yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, vol. XLIV, 2017, 111-130.
“‘Compassion is learned’: Of Squirrels and Men in the Poetry and Prose of Vizenor.” The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor, edited by Deborah Madsen, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012, 164-83.
“Elvis Presley as Indian in Film and Life.” American Indians and American Popular Culture, vol. 1, edited by Elizabeth Laney Hoffman, Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012, 55-68.
“Gerald’s Game: Radical Singularity and Postmodern Subjectivity in Vizenor’s Ojibwe Memoir.” Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts, edited by Deborah Madsen and Robert Lee, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011, 46-66.
“From Orion to the Postindian: Vizenor’s Movement toward Postmodern Theory.” Across Cultures/Across Borders: Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures, edited by Paul DePasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, and Emma LaRocque, Petersborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2010. 217-27.
Articles
"Maggoty Urgings Toward Revenge”: Edward Albee’s Adaptation of James Purdy’s “Malcolm.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 9 September 2020, online, 4,722 words.
“Becoming James Purdy: The ‘New’ Stories in The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy.” MidAmerica, the yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, vol. XLIV, 2017, pp. 111-130.
“Blown Away: Paul B. Sears and Oklahoma.” New Plains Review, fall 2015, pp. 89-92.
“Imagine Lennon as Choctaw Code-Talker: Indigenized Beatles in Howe’s Miko Kings.” NAIS: Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, no. 2, fall 2014, pp. 89-104.
“‘Original Stock’ in America”: James Purdy’s Native American Desire in Eustace Chisholm and the Works.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 52, no. 2, 2011, pp. 176-97.
“Friends of the Osages: John Joseph Mathews’ Wah’Kon-Tah and Osage-Quaker Cross-Cultural Collaboration.” Chronicles of Oklahoma, vol. 88, no. 2, winter 2010-11, pp. 138-144.
“James Leo Herlihy and Key West.” Littoral: The Journal of the Key West Literary Seminar. April 2010, www.kwls.org/key-wests-life-of letters/james_leo_herlihythe_midnight/, 1,348 words.
“‘He certainly didn’t want anyone to know that he was queer’: Chal Windzer’s Sexuality in John Joseph Mathews’ Sundown.” SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 20, no. 1, 2008, pp. 27-54.
“Crises of Masculinity: Homosocial Desire and Homosexual Panic in the Critical Cold War Narratives of Mailer and Coover.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 48, no. 3, spring 2007, pp. 250-277.
“Premonitions of the Postmodern: Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and Los Angeles in the Thirties.” Huxley Annual, vol. 5, 2005, pp. 167-92.
Refernce Works
“Gerald Vizenor.” Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, vol. 2, edited by Michael Ryan, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 886-88.
“Robert Coover.” The Literary Encyclopedia, edited by Christopher Hugh Gair, vol. 3.2.4: Postwar and Contemporary Writing and Culture of the United States, 1945-present, 2010, www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1011, 2,516 words.
Book Reviews
Monahsetah, Resistance and Other Markings on Turtle’s Back by Maurice Kenny. Dawnland Voices 2.0: Indigenous Writing from New England and the Northeast, issue 5, March 2018, dawnlandvoices.org/michael-snyder-issue-5/, 2,144 words
Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature, edited by Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen. SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 24, no. 4, winter 2012, pp. 99-103.
In the Bear’s House by N. Scott Momaday. American Indian Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 4, fall 2011, pp. 617-619.
Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance, by Gerald Vizenor. Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 4, fall 2010, p. 320.
Searching for Yellowstone: Race, Gender, Family, and Memory in the Postmodern West, by Norman K. Denzin. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 34, no. 2, 2010.
X-Indian Chronicles, the Book of Mausape, by Thomas M. Yeahpau. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 31, no. 3, 2007, pp. 251-54.
The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative, by Thomas King. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 29, no. 4, 2005, pp. 170-72.
Contact
Office: Cate Two, room 215
Email: msnyder@ou.edu