***CANCELLED*** 7th annual AIR lecture to host Choctaw/Chickasaw writer Phillip Carroll Morgan

DUE TO THE EXPANDING NUMBER OF COVID CASES IN CLARKE COUNTY, GA, PHILLIP CARROLL MORGAN HAS RESCHEDULED FOR 2022

Each year on the Autumnal Equinox, the AIR series celebrates the return of Natives to the southeast through the work of artists, writers, and scholars. Southeastern American Indian communities were removed from their homelands in the 1830s.

This year, Phillip Carroll Morgan, award-winning author of three Chickasaw Press titles (Chickasaw Renaissance, Riding Out the Storm: 19th Century Chickasaw Governors and Their Intellectual Legacy, and co-author of Dynamic Chickasaw Women. Anompolichi: The Wordmaster is Morgan’s first novel for White Dog Press. Dynamic Chickasaw Women and his wife, Kate Arnott Morgan, an accomplished sculptor and painter, celebrate the 115th anniversary of Morgans’ Mulberry Grove Farm near Blanchard, Oklahoma, home to the Morgan clan for generations. He calls his approach to farming on the family’s remnant of the lands, formerly held in common by the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations, “agroforestry.” This means managing land with a combination of agricultural and forestry principles. “Our land has never been bought or sold,” says Morgan. “It is the spirit of these lands inhabited by clans in my tribe for 10,000 years, from the prairies to the Gulf shores, that I try to reach for in my work.”

Anompolichi: The Wordmaster is Morgan’s first novel for White Dog Press. Dynamic Chickasaw Women won the Independent Publishers Book Awards’ Gold Medal for Mid-West Regional non-fiction in 2012, and Riding Out the Storm won the Gold Medal in that category in 2014. Poetry by Morgan appears in 2020 Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry as well as The Fork-in-the-Road Indian Poetry Store, which won the Native Writers Circle of the Americas First Book Award for Poetry in 2002. He also co-authored Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, a conversation between leading experts in Native American literature. Morgan is the founding staff writer in 2008 for Chickasaw Press, the only tribally sponsored publisher in the U.S. He holds a master’s degree and a doctorate in Native American literature from the University of Oklahoma.

The AIR series is sponsored by Eidson Chair in American Literature LeAnne Howe and the Eidson Foundational Fund in the department of English, the Creative Writing Program, associate professor Channette Romero, and professor Jace Weaver.