Book Fest Reading List: 2024
Discover books and publications written by authors hosted at Fort Collins Book Fest in 2024.
Learn more about the individual titles and explore author bios.
Fiction
by Oscar Hokeah
Oscar Hokeah’s electric debut, Calling for a Blanket Dance, takes us into the life of Ever Geimausaddle, whose family—part Mexican, part Native American—is determined to hold onto their community despite obstacles everywhere they turn. Ever’s father is injured at the hands of corrupt police on the border when he goes to visit family in Mexico, while his mother struggles both to keep her job and care for her husband. And young Ever is lost and angry at all that he doesn’t understand, at this world that seems to undermine his sense of safety. Ever’s relatives all have ideas about who he is and who he should be. His Cherokee grandmother, knowing the importance of proximity, urges the family to move across Oklahoma to be near her, while his grandfather, watching their traditions slip away, tries to reunite Ever with his heritage through traditional gourd dances. Through it all, every relative wants the same: to remind Ever of the rich and supportive communities that surround him, there to hold him tight, and for Ever to learn to take the strength given to him to save not only himself but also the next generation.
Winner of the PEN America/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel * Finalist for the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize * Finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize/Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
by Ramona Emerson
Rita Todacheene the main character of Shutter, is a forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force. Her excellent photography skills have cracked many cases–she is almost supernaturally good at capturing details. In fact, Rita has been hiding a secret: she sees the ghosts of crime victims who point her toward the clues that other investigators overlook. As a lone portal back to the living for traumatized spirits, Rita is terrorized by nagging ghosts who won’t let her sleep and who sabotage her personal life. Her taboo and psychologically harrowing ability was what drove her away from her hometown on the Navajo reservation, where she was raised by her grandmother. It has isolated her from friends and gotten her in trouble with the law. And now it might be what gets her killed. When Rita is sent to photograph the scene of a supposed suicide on a highway overpass, the furious, discombobulated ghost of the victim–who insists she was murdered–latches onto Rita, forcing her on a quest for revenge against her killers, andRita finds herself in the crosshairs of one of Albuquerque’s most dangerous cartels. Written in sparkling, gruesome prose, Shutter is a blood-chilling debut from one of crime fiction’s most powerful new voices.
Longlisted for the National Book Award
by David Heska Wanbli Weiden
Virgil Wounded Horse, the protagonist of Winter Counts is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil’s nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop.
They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost.
Winter Counts is a tour-de-force of crime fiction, a bracingly honest look at a long-ignored part of American life, and a twisting, turning story that’s as deeply rendered as it is thrilling.
Winner, Spur Awards for Best Contemporary Novel and Best First Novel. Winner, Lefty Award for Best Debut Mystery Novel. Shortlisted, Best First Novel, Bouchercon Anthony Awards. Shortlisted, Best First Novel, International Thriller Writers. Shortlisted, Dashiell Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing, International Association of Crime Writers. Longlisted, VCU Cabell First Novel Award. Shortlisted, Barry Award for Best First Novel. Shortlisted, Reading the West Award. Shortlisted, Colorado Book Award (Thriller).
by Laura Pritchett
When a wildfire bears down on a mountain community,residents are forced to gather for safety—resulting in a tangle of love andlust that pulls people from their isolation, friendships that form acrosspolitical divides, and a new hope for rethinking the ways humans inhabit theburning planet. Playing with Wildfire is a literary landscapethat is an experiment in form: an astrology report; a grantapplication-turned-love-story; a phone call from Mother Earth; an obituary fora wildfire; a burned mountain’s conversation with a lone woman and an injuredbear. Every story captures how fire affects the human psyche andlife, and how destruction can lead to renewal.
by Nina McConigley
Set in Wyoming and India, the short story collection Cowboys and East Indians explores the immigrant experience and the collisions of cultures in the American West as seen through the eyes of outsiders. From Indian motel owners to a kleptomaniac foreign exchange student, from a cross-dressing, sari-wearing cowboy to oil-rig workers, from an adopted cowgirl to a medical tourist in India-the characters in these stories are lonely and are looking for connection, and yet they can also be problematic and aggressive in order to survive in an isolated landscape.
Nonfiction
by Camille T. Dungy
In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.
by Teow Lim Goh
In Western Journeys, Teow Lim Goh charts her journeys immigrating from Singapore and spending the last fifteen years living in and exploring the American West. Goh chronicles her lived experiences while building on the longer history of immigrants from Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bringing new insights to places, the historical record, and memory. These vital essays consider how we access truth in the face of erasure. In exploring history, nature, politics, and art, Goh asks, “What does it mean for an immigrant to be at home?” Looking beyond the captivating landscapes of the American West, Goh uncovers stories of the Chinese people who came to America during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Indigenous peoples who have been written out of popular narratives, and the early mountaineers’ merciless ambitions, among many others. She examines the links between the transcontinental railroad, the cowboy myth, and the anti-Chinese prejudice that persists today. These essays explore the early efforts to climb Colorado’s highest peaks, the massacre of Chinese miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and the increasingly destructive fire seasons in the West. Goh’s essays create a complex, varied, and sometimes contradictory story of people and landscapes, a tapestry of answers and questions.
by Julie Carr
Populism has become a global movement associated with nationalism and strong-man politicians, but its root causes remain elusive. Mud, Blood, and Ghosts exposes one deep root in the soil of the American Great Plains. Julie Carr traces her own family’s history through archival documents to draw connections between U.S. agrarian populism, spiritualism, and eugenics, helping readers to understand populism’s tendency toward racism and exclusion. Carr follows the story of her great-grandfather Omer Madison Kem, three-term Populist representative from Nebraska, avid spiritualist, and committed eugenicist, to explore persistent themes in U.S. history: property, personhood, exclusion, and belonging. Carr connects Kem’s journey with that of America’s white establishment and its fury of nativism in the 1920s. Presenting crucial narratives of Indigenous resistance, interracial alliance and betrayal, radical feminism, lifelong hauntings, land policy, debt, shame, grief, and avarice from the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era, Carr asks whether we can embrace the Populists’ profound hopes for a just economy while rejecting the barriers they set up around who was considered fully human, fully worthy of this dreamed society.
by Deborah Jackson Taffa
Deborah Jackson Taffa was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents—citizens of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe—were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Whiskey Tender offers a sharp and thought-provoking historical analysis laced with humor and heart. As she reflects on her past and present—the promise of assimilation and the many betrayals her family has suffered, both personal and historical; trauma passed down through generations—she reminds us of how the cultural narratives of her ancestors have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of the “melting pot” of America, revealing all that is sacrificed for the promise of acceptance.
A Zibby Mag “Most Anticipated Book.” A San Francisco Chronicle “New Book to Cozy Up With.” A Publishers Weekly “Memoirs & Biographies: Top 10.” The Millions “Most Anticipated.” An Electric Lit “Books By Women of Color to Read.”
Comics
by R. Alan Brooks
Imagine you’ve been paralyzed for 5 years, all because of a betrayal by those you trusted. Then, one day, you suddenly have a healthy body, and can pursue your would-be murderers. Of course, none of you are human, and you were sent to this world for a reason. What would you do?
Children
Picture Book by Uma Krishnaswami
Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary each tell their story, culminating in their thrilling ascent of Mount Everest. Tenzing Norgay grew up in Nepal, herding yaks in the shadow of Chomolungma, the mountain also known as Everest. He has always dreamed of climbing to the top. He becomes a guide, leading treks through the Himalayas, and finally attempts the highest mountain himself, but doesn’t make it. Across the ocean, in New Zealand, Edmund Hillary grew up tending his father’s bees. He climbed his first mountain at sixteen and has climbed all over the world ever since. He tries Everest, with no success. In 1953, the two men set out on the same expedition to climb Everest. Their party numbers four hundred, counting all the guides and porters. But the climb is grueling, and eventually Norgay and Hillary are the only two determined to continue. They tramp over windswept glaciers, crawl across rope bridges, hack footholds in the ice … until finally they reach the top of the world! This remarkable true adventure story, told in a dual narrative, includes illustrated backmatter rich in geography, history and science.
Middle Grade Book by Uma Krishnaswami
Mohandas Gandhi and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. both shook and changed the world in their quest for peace among all people, but what threads connected these great activists together in their shared goal of social revolution? A lawyer and activist, tiny of stature with giant ideas, in British-ruled India at the beginning of the 20th century. A minister from Georgia with a thunderous voice and hopes for peace at the height of the civil rights movement in America. Born more than a half-century apart, with seemingly little in common except one shared wish, both would go on to be icons of peaceful resistance and human decency. Both preached love for all human beings, regardless of race or religion. Both believed that freedom and justice were won by not one, but many. Both met their ends in the most unpeaceful of ways—assassination. But what led them down the path of peace? How did their experiences parallel…and diverge? Threads of Peace keenly examines and celebrates these extraordinary activists’ lives, the threads that connect them, and the threads of peace they laid throughout the world, for us to pick up, and weave together
Middle Grade Book by Malia Maunakea
Curses aren’t real. At least, that’s what twelve-year-old, part-Hawaiian Anna Leilani Kama’ehu thinks when she listens to her grandmother’s folktales about sacred flowers and family guardians. Anna’s friends back home in Colorado don’t believe in legends, either. They’re more interested in science and sports—real, tangible things that stand in total contrast to Anna’s family’s embarrassing stories.
So when Anna goes back to Hawai’i to visit her Tutu, she has no interest in becoming the heir to her family’s history; she’s set on having a touristy, fun vacation. But when Anna accidentally insults Pele the fire goddess by destroying her lehua blossom, a giant hawk swoops in and kidnaps her best friend, and she quickly learns just how real these mo’olelo are. To save her friends and family, Anna must now battle mythical creatures, team up with demigods and talking bats, and evade the traps Pele hurls her way. For if Anna hopes to undo the curse, she will have to dig deep into her Hawaiian roots and learn to embrace all of who she is.
Poetry
by Cindy Juyoung Ok
In the 118th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spaces—from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided countries to hospice wards. She plumbs these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of each reality’s language, word to word, as she uncovers fractured private codes and shares them in argument, song, and prayer. Using visual play in invented forms, Ok counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person’s character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. The poems disrupt expectation with the comedy of institutionalized teens, nostalgia after the climate crisis, tenderness in a nursing home, and the wholeness of faltering Englishes. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok’s resolute, energized debut shifts language’s fissures to reassemble them into a new place of belonging.
by Rajiv Mohabir
As formally visionary and acoustically attuned as ever, Mohabir has composed an interspecies opera in Whale Aria. This collection examines the humpback whale as a zoomorphic analog of the queer, brown, migratory speaker breaching these pages; just as a person navigates postcolonial queerness across geopolitical boundaries, traveling from India to Guyana to London to New York to Honolulu, these singular cetaceans wander through disparate waters. Undersea, whales call to one another through their marine music, and, using the documented structure of humpback vocalizations, Mohabir translates the syntax of their songs into poetry.
by Sommer Browning
At birth we are given a role–it is our name. Good Actors is a side-eyed illumination of the artist as self-help guru, oracle, and sage, but more importantly as mother, lover, and friend. Part psychological experiment, part conceptual art piece, part screenplay, Good Actors is 100% a joyful celebration of language and life. And because it is Sommer, the book is hilarious, melancholy, and existential.
by Kate Partridge
Thine explores shifting iterations of the poetic self, both in body and in perspective, within the context of rapidly changing landscapes in the American West. The book’s observational approach draws together ecopoetics with art and myth, turning a skeptical eye toward predictions of both apocalypse and hope. These poems find beauty in the impermanence of land, animals, and people, and meditates, with affectionate irony, on what it means to make new lives in the midst of the unknown.
by Tameca L Coleman / Meca’Ayo
An Identity Polyptych is a multi-part, multi-genre experimental work that explores familial estrangement, identity as a mixed-race Black person, and movement towards reconciliation. It can be considered a memoir. The book works to find peace, even if it feels next to impossible. It keeps in mind the trickiness of memory, the effects of trauma, the necessity and constant work of healing, and the unfulfilled wish to feel a true sense of belonging.
by Megan Kaminski, Brad Vogler, Lori Anderson Moseman, Sarah Green
Quietly Between is the first project of A Viewing Space, and contains poetry and photographs from Megan Kaminksi, Brad Vogler, Lori Anderson Moseman, and Sarah Green. Each started with the same prompt involving place and time, and this is the collection of their interaction with that prompt.