Meet novelist Donna Coffey Little, who has written an epic saga about Cherokee life and culture, “Wofford’s Blood.” The book is based upon interviews with one of the last survivors of the Trail of Tears, J.D. Wofford, done in 1891 by Smithsonian ethnologist, James Mooney.  All the characters, places, and historical events in “Wofford’s Blood” are based upon primary source material.

The main character J.D. is a teenage boy, who is caught between the worlds of a white father and a Cherokee mother.  He spends his winters in his mother’s Cherokee world and his summers in his father’s world—Wofford’s Settlement, the most notorious Intruder outpost in north Georgia.

The novel dramatizes the daily lives, the sacred myths and rituals, the gender roles, and especially the coming-of-age events of young men’s lives in the Cherokee world. J.D. has high status in his community, an apprentice to a medicine man.  A trip to Kentucky to kill a buffalo is his right-of passage into manhood.

Little is a professor of English and creative writing at Reinhardt University. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. She has published a chapbook “Fire Street” as well as essays, poems, and scholarly articles in “Contemporary Women’s Writing,” “Modern Fiction Studies,” “Women’s Studies,” and many other journals