Native American Author To Speak at MSU

Native American author Eddie Chuculate will present at Midwestern State University as part of the Speakers and Issues Series and the James Hoggard Reading Series. He will read from his award-winning short story collection at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 24, at the Wichita Falls Museum of Art at MSU.

Chuculate, a Creek-Cherokee Indian, was born in 1972 in Claremore, Oklahoma, and spent his youth in nearby Muskogee. He was a sportswriter for nine years before attending the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and was persuaded by the poet Jon Davis to change his major from museum studies to creative writing. He held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University, and earned a master's degree from the prestigious University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop.

"Galveston, 1826," the first story in Cheyenne Madonna, Chuculate's collection of linked short stories, won an O'Henry Prize in 2007, and the second story received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention. Chuculate wrote while working as editor at newspapers in Tulsa, Albuquerque, Denver, and Abu Dhabi. Universities across the country including the University of Arizona, Pennsylvania State, and the University of Oklahoma include his work in their literature courses.

Chuculate's stories have appeared in Manoa, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Blue Mesa Review, Many Mountains Moving, and The Kenyon Review. He currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The Speakers and Issues Series is supported by the Libra Foundation, MSU's Prothro-Yeager College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Wichita Falls Times Record News, KCCU-FM NPR Radio, and KFDX-TV3. The James Hoggard Reading Series began earlier this year to honor the legacy of longtime English professor James Hoggard.

Admission is free; donations are welcome. Contact Dr. John Schulze at john.schulze@msutexas.edu or visit www.msutexas.edu/sis for more information.