Today’s GalleyCrush is Kelli Jo Ford’s Crooked Hallelujah, forthcoming from Grove Press on July 14, 2020.
Perfect pitch: “This is a big-hearted and ambitious novel of the powerful bonds between mothers and daughters by an exquisite and rare new talent.”
First lines: “When Lula stepped into the yard, the stray cat Justine held took off so fast it scratched her and sent the porch swing sideways.”
Big blurb: “Crooked Hallelujah is an intricate, soulful look at three generations of Cherokee women pushed (in Philip Larkin’s phrase) to the side of their own lives. At turns gripping and moving, Kelli Jo Ford’s characters and the Oklahoma and Texas landscape take center stage in a truly modern drama. Ford sidesteps the easy tropes of spirituality and connection to nature and has created a modern masterpiece peopled with complex, fully-realized characters. A huge achievement.” —David Treuer
Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 304 pages.
Author bio: 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, Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, among other places.
