Set in rural Oklahoma during the late 1980s, Where the Dead Sit Talking is a startling, authentically voiced and lyrically written Native American coming-of-age story

WHERE THE DEAD SIT TALKING
by Brandon Hobson
Soho Press, February 2018

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, another youth staying with the Troutts. 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.

Brandon Hobson is the author of four books. He has won a Pushcart Prize, and his stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, NOON, and elsewhere. He is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.