Reconnecting to Matrilineal Homes: Chelsea T. Hicks in conversation with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Chelsea T. Hicks is a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts’ MFA in creative writing, and holds an MA from the University of California at Davis. She is a Tulsa Artist Fellow and a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation LIFT Awardee. Her writing has been published in Poetry magazine, McSweeney’s, Yellow Medicine Review, the LA Review of Books, Indian Country Today, the Believer, The Audacity, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her advocacy includes work with Northern and Southern California Osage diaspora groups, and heritage language creative writing and revitalization workshops. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma on ancestral land. Chelsea T. Hicks is the author of the forthcoming collection of short stories, A Calm & Normal Heart.

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of the novels SAVAGE TONGUES (Mariner, 2021) and CALL ME ZEBRA (Mariner, 2018) which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the John Gardner Award, and was long listed for the PEN Open Book Award. It has been translated into Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish and Romanian and was published in the UK by Alma Books, a division of Bloomsbury. She received a 2015 Whiting Writers' Award and was a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree for her debut novel, FRA KEELER (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2012). She is the Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Notre Dame, a Fellow of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the founder of Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance.

Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance, launched by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Letters and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the newly launched Initiative on Race and Resilience, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.

Originally published at litofexile.nd.edu.