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. The New York Times calls Wandering Stars “a towering achievement,” and NPR describes it as “an eloquent indictment of the devastating long-term effects of the massacre, dislocation, and forced assimilation of Native Americans [that] is also a heartfelt paean to the importance of family and of ancestors’ stories in recovering a sense of belonging and identity…Wandering Stars more than fulfills the promise of There There.”
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 the best books of 2021 by NPR, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature. Her novella, Time’s Agent—about a disgraced archeologist searching for the last Taino tribe in pocket universes displaced by time, and her last chance to redeem herself to her wife, the world, and the robot dog that holds her daughter’s consciousness—is out in August. She teaches at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
