Virtual Event – Kelli Jo Ford

Magic City Books is proud to welcome Kelli Jo Ford for a virtual author event in celebration of her debut novel, Crooked Hallelujah, a multi-generational novel that spans four decades in the life of a family of Cherokee women.

Kelli Jo will be joined in conversation by Brandon Hobson, author of Where the Dead Sit Talking, a 2018 finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction.

This event will be hosted on the Zoom platform. 

To register in advance click here

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about attending the event on Thursday July 22.

Crooked Hallelujah is available to pre-order now (publication date is July 14) at Magic City Books or you can order your copy online here: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/crooked-hallelujah/155

About Crooked Hallelujah

It’s 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women, presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine’s father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church – a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But Justine does her best as a devoted daughter, until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever.

Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine–a mixed-blood Cherokee woman– and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. However, life in Texas isn’t easy, and Reney feels unmoored from her family in Indian Country. Against the vivid backdrop of the Red River, we see their struggle to survive in a world–of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces, like wildfires and tornados–intent on stripping away their connections to one another and their very ideas of home.

In lush and empathic prose, Kelli Jo Ford depicts what this family of proud, stubborn, Cherokee women sacrifice for those they love, amid larger forces of history, religion, class, and culture. This is a big-hearted and ambitious novel of the powerful bonds between mothers and daughters by an exquisite and rare new talent.

Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, the Everett Southwest Literary Award, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Award at Bread Loaf, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, among other places.