CALS Speaker Series and NEA Big Read presents Tommy Orange

Bestselling author of There There and Wandering Stars

Join us at the Ron Robinson Theater on Thursday, May 16, for a discussion with Tommy Orange. Moderated by Andrea L. Rogers. This CALS Speakers Series event is honoring Rabbi Ira Sanders.

Tommy Orange is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel There There, a multigenerational, relentlessly paced story about a side of America few of us have ever seen: the lives of urban Native Americans. There There was one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year, and won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Pen/Hemingway Award. There There was also longlisted for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His next novel, Wandering Stars, will be released in February 2024. Orange graduated from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was 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.

About There There: 

A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

“This is the kind of novel you finish and immediately need your book club to read so you can talk about it with other people. . . . It’s also a powerful reminder of the ability of narrative to move minds.” (GOOP)

About Wandering Stars:

“…a masterful follow-up to his already classic first novel. Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous… Wandering Stars is a novel about epigenetic and generational trauma that has the force and vision of a modern epic, an exceptionally powerful new book from one of the most exciting writers at work today and soaring confirmation of (the author’s) monumental gifts.” (publishers press blurb)

"For the sake of knowing, of understanding, Wandering Stars blew my heart into a thousand pieces and put it all back together again. This is a masterwork that will not be forgotten, a masterwork that will forever be part of you.” (Morgan Talty, bestselling author of Night of the Living Rez)

NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest. El Proyecto NEA Big Read es una iniciativa del National Endowment for the Arts (el Fondo Nacional para las Artes de Estados Unidos) en cooperacion con Arts Midwest.