Tommy Orange Reading & Conversation with Nick Taylor

The Center for Literary Arts is pleased to present Tommy Orange, author of There There on Thursday, February 6, 2020 at the Hammer Theatre’s Black Box Theatre at 7PM. The reading will be followed by an on-stage interview with professor, Nick Taylor, plus an audience Q&A, book sale and signing.

A national bestseller, There There has won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the American Book Award. Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, utterly contemporary and always unforgettable. The novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to each other in ways they may not yet realize. There is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and working to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, who is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death, has come to work at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil has come to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American—grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.

Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California.

Nick Taylor is the author of the historical novels Double Switch, The Setup Man, The Disagreement, and Father Junípero’s Confessor. His work has earned a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship and the Michael Shaara Prize for Civil War Fiction. He has also received support from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the William R. Kenan, Jr., Fund for Historic Preservation. Currently Nick serves as Professor of English and Director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University.