Tommy Orange
Thursday, June 14, 2018, 7:00 p.m., City Lights Booksellers, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco
reading from There There published by Alfred Knopf Not since Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine has such a powerful and urgent Native American voice exploded onto the landscape of contemporary fiction. Tommy Orange's There There introduces a brilliant new author at the start of a major career. Tommy Orange is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a 2014 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California, and currently lives in Angels Camp, California. Praise for the work of Tommy Orange: "When Tommy Orange first sent me a chapter of his novel, There There, I read it and marveled. I then read it aloud to my wife. And then I emailed and called my closest writer friends. I said, 'It’s here. That book I’ve been waiting for. It has arrived.’ Tommy Orange has indeed arrived. And his debut novel is a beautiful, dangerous, sad, poetic, and hilarious revelation. Set in Oakland, California, There There is truly the first book to capture what it means to be an urban Indian—perhaps the first novel ever to celebrate and honor and elevate the joys and losses of urban Indians. You might think I’m exaggerating but this book is so revolutionary—evolutionary—that Native American literature will never be the same." |