“This summer, we are taking a swim in Oklahoma literature, reading books from 1930 to the present and across genres ranging from sci-fi to westerns. Join us as we make our way through Oklahoma’s history and present.”

There’s a level of endurance required with being a writer and even more with being queer and in the greater context of doing that in a place like Tulsa it’s compounding one after the other. The queer community in Tulsa has a true radiance to it - it’s really supportive and has a flavor of resistance to it in order to be unapologetic in the buckle of the Bible belt.

[Being] an Oklahoma writer means to belong to a large, sometimes dysfunctional family, a bunch of honest cousins who understand our state’s complex and contradictory and violent history, but resist the temptation to exploit or excuse. Oklahoma poets are honest enough to seek redemptive possibilities within our associations and demonstrate them in our writing.

The challenge, though, especially with immigrant writers or writers who write across cultures is to not get pigeonholed into one category. It has happened often, when I’ve seen that my books are placed under a “multicultural” or “foreign” label. I disagree with this, as I think that books like mine touch on universal themes, seasoned with culture. They belong on the main shelves. 

Oklahoma really is Native America. Aside from Alaska or New Mexico, there aren’t many states like it. I have found that because I don’t really have to think about the ways that I am alone or different as a Native person, my mind is freed up to focus on my craft and practice. There is something to be said about that. For Native people, I don’t think it is talked about enough.

There are approximately 200 books in my Oklahoma Writing bookcase. All of those books have influenced me—they share with me their craft knowledge, their methods of representing our state and people.

I thought I’d open this new chapter of Archive Serendipities with a list because it’s difficult to explain to people the depth and breadth of archival materials on Oklahoma literary history, and, for me, primarily, the history of Oklahoma poets and poetry.

We established Okie Modern to promote the literature of a state with a complicated historical inheritance–a place once called “No Man’s Land.” We are a journal that believes literature and life can and do flourish in the so-called “flyover” regions of our country–in the places derided for their supposed emptiness, shrouded in myth and obscured by stereotypes.