Tulsa LitFest Opening Night Mixer

Following the Opening Night Reading at OSU-Tulsa Campus, hosts Eric Howerton (Center for Poets and Writers, OSU) and Quraysh Ali Lansana (TriCity Collective, TU) invite you to a night of merriment, food, drink and friends. This year marks the 8th annual Tulsa LitFest, and to celebrate the freeing power of storytelling and writing in all forms, join us, mingle, and enjoy the words of poet Claire Campo and fiction-writer Kashona Notah.

Claire Campo is an actor, poet, teaching artist, and co-founder of Poetic Justice, an innovative program aimed at facilitating literacy and poetry workshops within carceral settings. They currently serve on the Living Arts spoken word committee. Their short film i love you like science, received the Linklater Award for Best Dialogue at Austin Arthouse Film Festival. They have been featured on TV shows such as The Gifted on Fox, Tyler Perry’s The Haves and the Have Nots and their forthcoming feature film Carnation, has been named one of Australia’s Top 100 most anticipated films of 2025. Their poetry has been published in This Land Press, Emerge Magazine, New Words Press & Super Present Magazine. They are of Mohawk, French, and Dutch descent, Collins is deeply invested in the cultural preservation and revitalization of their indigenous heritage as a member of the Six Nations of the Grand River.

Kashona Notah is a fiction writer and 2024-2026 Tulsa Artist Fellow. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Yellow Medicine Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in fiction from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and a BA in English with a minor in Native American Studies from Stanford University. Among other honors, Notah is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, the Hopwood Award for Fiction, the Hopwood Award for Nonfiction, and the National Native Media Award for environmental coverage. He is an Iñupiaq tribal citizen and was raised since birth within a Diné family through his late adoptive father. Originally from San Bernardino, California, Notah currently lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Tulsa.

Host or Publisher Tulsa LitFest