Author Works: Brandon Hobson & "The Removed"
Presented by Howard County Library System
Wednesday, March 10
7:00pm - 8:00pm
Steeped in Cherokee myths and history, a novel about a fractured family reckoning with the tragic death of their son long ago?from National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson
“Brandon Hobson has given us a haunted work, full of voices old and new. It is about a family’s reckoning with loss and injustice, and it is about a people trying for the same. The journey of this family’s way home is full—in equal measure—of melancholy and love. The Removed is spirited, droll, and as quietly devastating as rain lifting from earth to sky.”
—Tommy Orange, author of There There
In the fifteen years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. With the family’s annual bonfire approaching—an occasion marking both the Cherokee National Holiday and Ray-Ray’s death, and a rare moment in which they openly talk about his memory—The mother, Maria, attempts to call the family together from their physical and emotional distances once more.
Drawing deeply on Cherokee folklore, The Removed seamlessly blends the real and spiritual to excavate the deep reverberations of trauma—a meditation on family, grief, home, and the power of stories on both a personal and ancestral level.
Preorder The Removed (February 2021) from Books with a Past.
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 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.
Please register with an email address to receive an automatic confirmation email with a link to join the event. This email will also contain the dial-in information if you would like to participate by phone.
Sponsored by Friends and Foundation of Howard County Library System and presented with support from Prince George's County Memorial Library System, Ruth Enlow Library of Garrett County and Charles County Public Library.
Charles County Public Library events are accessible for all. If you have an accessibility request, please contact programs@ccplonline.org three business days prior to the event.
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