Oscar Hokeah

Magic City Books is proud to welcome Oscar Hokeah for a launch party event celebrating his debut novel, Calling for a Blanket Dance on Tuesday July 26. This free event will be at 7:00 pm at the McKeon Center for Creativity on the TCC Metro campus at 910 South Boston Avenue.

Calling for a Blanket Dance is a moving and deeply engaging debut novel about a young Native American man finding strength in his familial identity, from a stellar new voice in fiction.

Oscar Hokeah is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma from his mother’s side and has Mexican heritage from his father’s side. His short stories have been published in publications such as South Dakota Review, American Short Fiction, Red Ink Magazine and more. He is a recipient of the Truman Capote Scholarship Award through IAIA and a winner of the Native Writer Award from the Taos Summer Writer’s Conference.

Calling for a Blanket Dance will be published on July 26 by Algonquin Books. It is available to pre-order now through Magic City Books, https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/calling-for-a-blanket-dance/818 and it will be for sale at the event on July 26.

About Calling for a Blanket Dance

Told in a series of voices, Calling for a Blanket Dance takes us into the life of Ever Geimausaddle through the multigenerational perspectives of his family as they face myriad obstacles. His father’s injury at the hands of corrupt police, his mother’s struggle to hold on to her job and care for her husband, the constant resettlement of the family, and the legacy of centuries of injustice all intensify Ever’s bottled-up rage. Meanwhile, all of Ever’s relatives have ideas about who he is and who he should be. His Cherokee grandmother urges the family to move across Oklahoma to find security; his grandfather hopes to reunite him with his heritage through traditional gourd dances; his Kiowa cousin reminds him that he’s connected to an ancestral past. And once an adult, Ever must take the strength given to him by his relatives to save not only himself but also the next generation of family.

How will this young man visualize a place for himself when the world hasn’t given him a place to start with? Honest, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting, Calling for a Blanket Dance is the story of how Ever Geimausaddle found his way to home.

Oscar Hokeah is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma from his mother’s side and has Mexican heritage through his father. He holds an MA in English with a concentration in Native American Literature from the University of Oklahoma, as well as a BFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), with a minor in Indigenous Liberal Studies. He is a recipient of the Truman Capote Scholarship Award through IAIA and is also a winner of the Native Writer Award through the Taos Summer Writers Conference. His short stories have been published in South Dakota Review, American Short Fiction, Yellow Medicine Review, Surreal South, and Red Ink Magazine. He works with Indian Child Welfare in Tahlequah.