Background
Recent Work
An essay into rematriation, with Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse, for World Literature Today
Honorée Jeffers’ Emeritus Scholarship for a presentation on Rematriation at AWP 2025
Lynn Riggs Memorial Reading at OU
Collage and screen prints featured in ‘From the Heart: Expressions of Indigenous Joy’
VOICES reading on Indigenous language adult literacy at Tulsa Public Library with Words of the People
Disrupting 250 Writers Retreat with Brea Baker and Black Liberation Indigenous Sovereignty
Waleze Panel Series: in conversation with other Osage marking-makers at Tulsa Artist Fellowship, 2024-2025
Radical Sharing dialogue at The Long Now with Bette Adriaanse
Visual art and spoken poem sequences in the film ‘A Bridge Over the Ocean’ by Francis Fourcou, and tour in France for release
Excerpt from WALEZE / MARKINGS on the cover of World Literature Today, with the poem “i want you to help us talk,” in the magazine
Wahzhazhe ie tarot deck, 𐓣͘ 𐓧𐓺 “rock marking” / 𐓧𐓺 being short for 𐓷𐓘𐓧𐓟𐓺𐓟 (commissioned work)
Osage Reconnection Zine Open Mic Night + Panel on Wahzhazhe Poetics
Opened the EMPOWERED 2023 Indigenous Fashion Show for Weomepe
Walking for J. Okuma and Patricia Michaels in the SWAIA 2023 Fashion Show
Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, Summer 2023
Installation in the front window of She Makes Art at Liggett Studio
Ancestral Land Tour for A Calm & Normal Heart: Stories (Unnamed Press)
Excerpt from WALEZE / MARKINGS in the Bookshelf Residency: Gato Negro & Phoneme Media at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Panelist, Osage Women Creatives in Conversation: Navigating Osage Stories at the Osage Nation Museum
Visiting Artist, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Education
University of Oklahoma, PhD, in progress
Institute of American Indian Arts, MFA in creative writing, 2020
University of California at Davis, MA in English, 2017
University of Virginia, BA with distinction in English, 2012
Bio
Chelsea Tayrien Hicks, 𐓸𐓶𐓟𐓰𐓫͘ “Looking to the Eagle” or Xuedoin, (she/they) is a storyteller and interdisciplinary artist. She was awarded the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award in 2023, and her writing has been published in Poetry, McSweeney’s, World Literature Today, Yellow Medicine Review, the LA Review of Books, Indian Country Today, the Believer, The Audacity, The Paris Review, and elsewhere and shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Manetti Shrem, the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and elsewhere. She has been pictured on Vogue.com, and her work has served as the cover of magazines such as World Literature Today. She is a past Writing By Writers Fellow, a 2016 Wah-Zha-Zhi Woman Artist featured by the Osage Nation Museum, a 2020 finalist for the Eliza So Fellowship for Native American women writers, a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation 2021 LIFT Awardee, and a 2022-2023 Tulsa Artist Fellow. Her first book A Calm & Normal Heart was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut short story collection.
Her advocacy work has included recruiting with the Virginia Indian Pre-College Outreach Initiative (VIP-COI), Northern and Southern California Osage diaspora groups, and heritage language creative writing and revitalization workshops. She authored poetry for the sound art collection Onomatopoeias For Wrangell-St. Elias, funded by the Double Hoo Grant at the University of Virginia, where she was awarded the Peter & Phyllis Pruden scholarship for excellence in the English major as well as the University Achievement Award (2008-2012). The Ford Foundation awarded her a 2021 honorable mention for promotion of Indigenous-language creative writing. She is the founding artist of the 501c3 organization Words of the People, which works to normalize Indigenous language creative expression.
Beginnings
Chelsea Tayrien Hicks 𐓸𐓶𐓟𐓰𐓫͘ “Looking to the Eagle” (Xuedoin) grew up mostly in Virginia, with summer stays in Bartlesville, Oklahoma at her iko’s (or grandmother’s house) during the Wazhazhe June dances, the Ilo^shka. After graduating from the University of Virginia on a full scholarship, she worked for several years as a journalist and in newsrooms.
In 2015, she moved to San Francisco and attended UC Davis while playing in bands around the SF Bay Area. After graduating with a creative/critical Master’s of Arts in English, she attended the Institute of American Indian Arts’ low-residency creative writing program and moved back to her tribal district of Pawhuska, Oklahoma where she taught at the Osage Nation’s language-focused tribal school while earning her MFA. The impact of learning her ancestral language of Wahzhazhe ie has influenced her to organize language-focused creative writing programs in Tulsa, Oklahoma where she directs Words of the People, an organization focused on normalizing creative work in Indigenous languages.
She is Wahzhazhe, of Pawhuska District, belonging to the Tsizho Washtake through her father Brian Hicks. She is a descendant of Ogeese Captain, Cyprian Tayrien, Rosalie Captain Chouteau, Mary Louise Vallé, Josephine Josette White Hair, 𐓇𐒻𐓀𐒻͘ 𐒹𐒰͘𐒼𐒰, Chief Pawhuska I, and her iko Betty Elsey Hicks, an original Osage allottee. She is a proud citizen of the Osage Nation.