Oklahoma Folklore and Literature Reading List Offers a Chance to Connect Prior to the Annual Meeting

You don’t have to wait to arrive at the AFS Annual Meeting in Tulsa to start learning more about the traditions and perspectives of the diverse communities who live there. The reading list provided below, assembled by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, faculty mentor for The Red Earth Creative Writing MFA @ Oklahoma City University, provides insight into the creative constructions of place through literature by Oklahoma writers.

Mish is leading Sense of Place: An Online Writing Workshop in Two Parts September 13 and 15. This program is facilitated by Dr. Mish, moderated by Laura Marcus Green (Communal Pen), hosted by the American Folklore Society, and sponsored by its Creative Writing and Storytelling Section. While registration is currently full for the workshop, there is a waiting list for anyone still interested in joining if space becomes available. Email Laura Marcus Green at [email protected] with the subject line Sense of Place-Wait List.” Given abundant interest in the workshop, Mish will offer another writing workshop after the annual meeting.

The link below directs to a viewable PDF in GoogleDrive.

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish’s most recent books are What I Learned at the War, a poetry collection (West End Press, 2016) and Oklahomeland: Essays (Lamar University Press, 2015). Her 2009 poetry collection, Work Is Love Made Visible (West End Press) won an Oklahoma Book Award, a Wrangler Award, and the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West. Her first collection, a chapbook entitled Tongue Tied Woman, won the 2001 Edda Poetry Chapbook for Women Competition. Mish served as Oklahoma State Poet Laureate from 2017-2020 and, in 2019, she was awarded a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets.

Mish has published poetry in This Land, Naugatuck River Review, Concho River Review, LABOR: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, World Literature Today, San Pedro River Review, About Place Journal, Mojave River Review, Halvard-Johnson’s Truck, Sundress Best Dressed, and Yellow Medicine Journal, among others. Essays and short fiction have appeared in Oklahoma Today, Sugar Mule, Crosstimbers, Red Dirt Chronicles, Hard Crackers, and The Emily Dickinson Society International Bulletin‘s essay series, “Poet to Poet.” 

Dr. Mish is a faculty mentor for The Red Earth Creative Writing MFA @ Oklahoma City University she teaches criticism and theory, poetics, poetry craft, and research for writers. For more information, visit jeanettacalhounmish.com.