Set in rural Oklahoma during the late 1980s, Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson is a stunning and lyrical Native American coming-of-age story.

With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother’s years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface. At least until he meets seventeen-year-old Rosemary, a troubled artist who also lives with the family.

Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah’s feelings toward Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both.

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Dr. Brandon Hobson is the author of the forthcoming novel, The Removed, as well as the novel, Where the Dead Sit Talking, which was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. A recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Ragdale Foundation residency, his fiction has appeared in such places as McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, NOON, and elsewhere. Hobson is an assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University and also teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. He is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.

Author and filmmaker, Brian Young, is a recipient of the prestigious Sundance Ford Foundation Fellowship and graduate of Yale University with a degree in Film Studies and Columbia University with a Master's in Creative Writing Fiction. An enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, Brian is currently working on his two book with Heartdrum, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Brandon Hobson on Where the Dead Sit Talking with Brian Young