Kelli Jo Ford

Biography

Kelli Jo Ford’s debut, Crooked Hallelujah, will be published by Grove Press in July 2020. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, a Katherine Bakeless Nason Award at Bread Loaf, a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, VQR, and the Missouri Review, among other places. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

See Work

FICTION / Spring 2020

The Year 2003 Minus 20

By Kelli Jo Ford ,  Illustration by Landis Blair

Reney’s bones can feel a fight long before the rest of her wakes to the rising voices and clattering bottles. She is eight, almost nine. Granny and Lula live in a new rent house across the tracks and down a long hill, not so very far. Over...

Illustration by Landis Blair
FICTION / Spring 2016

You Will Miss Me When I Burn

By Kelli Jo Ford ,  Illustration by Pat Perry

I spent my morning at the Dairy Queen with the loafers and the cattlemen who get their feeding done before first light. It was a sparse crowd—we didn’t know yet what the wind was going to do.