These days, I live in Virginia with my husband (and poet extraordinaire) Scott Weaver and daughter, Cypress. Crooked Hallelujah, my debut novel-in-stories about four generations of Cherokee women, is out now with Grove Press. In addition to my work as a freelance writer and editor, I teach fiction at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA program. I'm a citizen of the Cherokee Nation

“Hybrid Vigor,” a story from Crooked Hallelujah, won The Paris Review’s 2019 Plimpton Prize, and the manuscript for Crooked Hallelujah won the University of Central Oklahoma’s 2019 Everett Southwest Literary Award. I've been awarded an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, an Elizabeth George Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and a Katharine Bakeless Nason Award in Fiction by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 2016, I served as the Indigenous Writer-in-Residence at School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. I received an MFA from George Mason University.

I have work published or forthcoming in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and The Missouri Review, among other places. I'm pretty stoked to say that I'm represented by Adam Eaglin at The Cheney Agency. 

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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 an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, a Creative Capital Award, a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. She teaches writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.