Eddie Chuculate’s collection of linked short stories follows Jordan Coolwater from bored child to thoughtful teenager, struggling artist, escaped convict, and finally, father. Gritty, funny, and deeply perceptive, Cheyenne Madonna offers an unsentimental portrait of America, of its dispossessed, its outlaws, and its visionaries.
The first story in this debut collection, “Galveston Bay, 1826,” won an O. Henry Prize, and the second, “Yo Yo,” received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention. Admirers of the short stories of Jim Harrison and Annie Proulx will appreciate Chuculate’s steady, confident prose rooted in American realism.
Eddie Chuculate is an award-winning fiction writer and enrolled in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and of Cherokee descent from Oklahoma. A graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts, he was accepted to the Iowa's Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa and held a Wallace Stenger Fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University. His short story, Gavleston Bay, 1826, won the O. Henry Award in 2007.
Chuculate has worked at publication such as The Tulsa World and The Denver Post and serves as a faculty member of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.
Richard Rouillard is a former full-time Professor of English and Humanities at Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC). He received a B.A. at West Texas State University (1964) and an M.A. from Oklahoma State University (1972).
He was one of the original faculty/staff members hired in 1972 to develop courses for OCCC when it was called South Oklahoma City Junior College. Although retired from full time teaching, he served OCCC for several years as a part-time professor of Humanities by teaching Museum Studies at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art in the fall semester and Leadership Development on the OCCC campus in the spring semester.
Carolyn Rouillard, his wife, was also employed at the college having served in several capacities in Human Resources. She also served as an Adjunct Professor of Management in the Business Division.
Together they are very proud of their four children and eight grandchildren; the family is spread out from Oakland, CA, to Champaign, IL, from Rapid City, SD, to Wichita Falls, TX.
Richard writes poetry and enjoys travel and photography. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Friends of the Oklahoma Center for the Book and is a volunteer reader for the Oklahoma Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. He usually narrates articles from Cowboys and Indians and Oklahoma Today magazines as well as selected fiction and non-fiction books. One of the non-fiction books was Oklahoma: A History by Baird and Goble; this project was important because the Library did not have a general history of Oklahoma available to its patrons. He recently narrated The Green Corn Rebellion by William Cunningham, an Oklahoma novelist from the early part of the 1900’s. His most recent narration was Haunted Guthrie, Oklahoma by Tanya McCoy and Jeff Provine.
Richard is an avid, but slow, reader. For over ten years he has served as a judge for the Oklahoma Center for the Book Fiction Award. He is a firm believer in the Reader Response method of literary interpretation.