The Untold Story of the Dust Bowl - Oklahoma Center for the Humanities
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The Untold Story of the Dust Bowl

Join us Nov. 7 at 7 p.m. at 101 Archer!

The Oklahoma Center for the Humanities will welcome poet, essayist, and renown biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle to Tulsa in November to talk about the life of Sanora Babb and the legacy of the Dust Bowl.

Dunkle’s new book, Riding Like the Wind, chronicles the life of Sanora Babb, who drafted the field notes and oral histories of migrant farmworkers that John Steinbeck relied on to write the Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck’s publication stopped the publication of another important novel that she wrote, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true experiences of Dust Bowl migrants.

Riding Like the Wind explores Babb’s impoverished childhood in eastern Colorado and her journey to California. There, she befriended the era’s literati, including Ray Bradbury and Ralph Ellison, entered into an illegal marriage, and was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Babb’s work as a journalist and writer features heavily in Ken Burns’s The Dust Bowl and even inspired Kristin Hannah’s bestseller The Four Winds. Dunkle’s work reminds us with fresh awareness that the stories we know—and who tells them—can change the way we remember history.

The Atlantic recently published a lengthier piece about the biography that you can read here.

In keeping with OCH’s theme of Space, Dunkle’s work travels through the places and recasts the stories that have come to define the Dust Bowl in America’s popular imagination. The biography encourages readers to dig deeper into the Dust Bowl’s legacy by aligning it more directly with the personal lives and histories of migrants that Babb chronicled.

About the Author

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is a poet, literary biographer, and essayist. She writes that her academic and creative work “challenges the Western myth of progress by examining the devastating impact that agriculture and overpopulation have had and continue to have on the North American West.”

Dunkle is the author of West : Fire : Archive (Center for Literary Publishing, 2021); Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017), a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry and selected as The Rumpus’s July 2017 Poetry Book of the Month; There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (WordTech Communications, 2015), a finalist for the 2015 Snyder Prize; and Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013), winner of the 2012 Trio Award.

She was the 2017–2018 poet laureate of Sonoma County, California. She earned an MFA in poetry from New York University and a PhD in American literature from Case Western Reserve University.

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