[VIRTUAL] PEN Out Loud: Brandon Hobson with Rebecca Makkai

National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson joins PEN Out Loud to celebrate his latest novel, The Removed. Weaving together multiple first-person narrators and Cherokee folklore, the novel tells the story of a Cherokee family 15 years after an unjust police shooting of one of the family’s three children. Following a dramatic reading from the novel by Cherokee actor and playwright DeLanna Studi, Hobson will be joined in conversation with Pulitzer Prize finalist Rebecca Makkai to discuss the novel and its “meditation on family, grief, home, and the power of stories on both a personal and ancestral level.”

This digital event will start at 8pm ET / 5pm PT.

Presented in collaboration with Strand Book Store and Scripps Presents.

ASL interpretive services are provided by ProBono ASL.

Brandon Hobson is the author of the novel Where the Dead Sit Talking, which was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction and winner of the Reading the West Book Award. His other books include Desolation of Avenues Untold and the novella Deep Ellum. His work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology, The Believer, The Paris Review’s “The Daily,” Conjunctions, NOON, and McSweeney’s, among other places. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University and teaches in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Hobson is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation tribe of Oklahoma.

Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; was the winner of the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Stonewall Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction; and was named one of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University. She is the artistic director at StoryStudio Chicago. Twitter: @rebeccamakkai

DeLanna Studi (Cherokee) is an actor/playwright whose TV credits include Dreamkeeper, Edge of America, Shameless, General Hospital, Z Nation, and the third season of Goliath. Her theater credits include the first national Broadway tour of August: Osage County, off-Broadway’s Informed Consent and Gloria: A Life. She retraced her family’s footsteps along the Trail of Tears with her father and wrote her play And So We Walked, which is currently on tour. Theatre for One recently commissioned her newest short play Before American Was America, and The Theater Center commissioned Capax Infiniti. She is the chair of SAG-AFTRA’s National Native Americans Committee and the newly appointed artistic director of Native Voices at the Autry.

About Strand Book Store

Located on 12th and Broadway in New York City, the Strand Book Store is a family-owned, iconic literary destination with more than 90 years of history and 18 miles of books to prove it. Its events feature some of today’s most interesting and provocative authors. Its unparalleled inventory of 2.5 million new, used, and rare books and locally designed totes, gifts, and apparel makes it easy and exciting to get lost in the stacks.

About Scripps Presents

Scripps Presents is an electrifying mix of storytellers and artists, policymakers and musicians—and everything in between. Based at Scripps College, Scripps Presents provides a forum the Claremont Colleges and audiences across Southern California to engage with eye-opening, mind-bending, genre-defying tête-à-têtes with the thinkers and doers, writers and performers, whose passions and perspectives are changing the way we see the world.

This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Austin Public Library Foundation, Magic City Poetry Festival, Miami Book Fair, and Magic City Books are regional partners of PEN Out Loud’s Winter 2021 season.