DETAILS AND HOW TO WATCH: This is an online rebroadcast of Tommy Orange live event as part of the 2023/2024 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series. This online event will be accessible from the Inprint website. Details on how to access the reading will be provided to season subscribers. Those who purchase general admission tickets for this rebroadcast event will be provided the viewing link on their Eventbrite email receipt in the “Additional Information” section.
Tommy Orange will read from his new novel Wandering Stars, followed by an on-stage conversation with celebrated author and University of Houston faculty member Brenda Peynado. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the 2023/2024 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
TOMMY ORANGE’s first novel There There was “an astonishing literary debut” (Margaret Atwood) that “places Native American voices front and center” (NPR). Featuring the stories of 12 Native Americans all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, There There “has so much jangling energy and brings so much news from a distinct corner of American life that it’s a revelation” (The New York Times). There There was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the American Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Orange will read from and talk about his highly anticipated new novel Wandering Stars, which traces the dark history of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, the founding of the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians in 1879, and the 2018 shooting of Orvil Redfeather in There There. According to Orange’s publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Wandering Stars is “an utterly gripping story of history, legacy, and family in which all of Tommy’s prodigious gifts as a storyteller are on full display.” His editor adds, “Tommy Orange has returned with an unforgettably powerful multigenerational saga about what it means to be the children and grandchildren of massacre. Wandering Stars is a major achievement by one of the great writers of our time.”
BRENDA PEYNADO’s genre-bending short story collection, THE ROCK EATERS—featuring Latina girlhood, basement ghosts, alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows manifesting as tumorous stones—was named one of NPR, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature’s best books of 2021. She teaches at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.