Drawing Flowers from Earth

Todd Fuller is Curator of the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of 60 Feet Six Inches and Other Distances from Home: The (Baseball) Life of Mose YellowHorse and the poetry collection To the Disappearance. Rilla Askew is a novelist, essayist, and short-story writer known for her award-winning historical fiction. Fire in Beulah, her novel about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, received the American Book Award. Her Dust Bowl novel, Harpsong, received the Oklahoma Book Award, and her essay collection, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place, was long-listed for a PEN America Literary Award. She is Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. To learn more about her work, visit rillaaskew.com. Crag Hill is Professor of English Education at the University of Oklahoma. He is the co-editor, with Todd Fuller, of Level Land: Poems for and About the I35 Corridor. He also co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature, with Victor Malo Juvera, published in 2026 by Oxford University Press. Thomas Kahle is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Oklahoma. His research concerns twentieth century Native America with emphases on activism and policy. He also studies Indigenous sport and has authored and co-authored articles for the Society of American Baseball Research.

"The literary history of our still-young state has not yet been written, but when it is, this volume will provide for more than one chapter. Yet, the contribution of this work extends beyond historical interest. There are delights and challenges in these pages, real poetry full of vivid images, concentrated form, and distilled experience. The poems range widely, but they share in the tragedy and the promise that is the Oklahoma manner."-Benjamin Myers, author of Black Sunday: The Dust Bowl Sonnets