22nd Annual Scissortail: Featured Authors

Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her debut novel-in-stories Crooked Hallelujah was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, The Story Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, The Dublin Literary Award, and The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. She is the recipient of honors and awards such as The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, an NEA Literature Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation Fellowship. She teaches writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Wayne Miller is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The End of Childhood (Milkweed, 2025) and We the Jury (2021). His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, as well as the UNT Rilke Prize, two Colorado Book Awards, two Pushcart Prizes, six awards from the Poetry Society of America, and a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship to the Seamus Heaney Centre in Northern Ireland. He has co-translated three books by the Albanian writer Moikom Zeqo—most recently the prose collection Sellers of Chaos, forthcoming from Unbound Edition Press. He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, co-directs the Unsung Masters Series, and edits Copper Nickel.

Vu Tran is the author of Dragonfish – a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year – as well as a forthcoming novel, Your Origins. His criticism and short fiction have appeared in publications like the New York Times, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Stories, Virginia Quarterly, and McSweeney’s. Born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his PhD from the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, and is also the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the NEA, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Bread Loaf. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, where he is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Arts and Director of Undergraduate Studies.