Lunch for Libraries with Tommy Orange

April 23 @ 12:00 pm – 1:15 pm

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Our 13th annual Lunch for Libraries spring fundraiser will feature award-winning author Tommy Orange. This event will be held on Tuesday, April 23, at Monona Terrace Convention Center, with check-in at 11:30 a.m. and the program running from noon–1:15 p.m. Orange will speak in conversation with Aaron Bird Bear about his latest novel, Wandering Stars, the follow-up to his best-seller and 2019 American Book Award winner There There.

In Wandering Stars, extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous — piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.

Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, Calif. He lives in Oakland with his wife and son.

Aaron Bird Bear (Mandan, Hidatsa & Diné — citizen of Three Affiliated Tribes) served as the inaugural Director of Tribal Relations at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 2019-23. In that time, Bird Bear served as co-principal investigator for an educational research project, Indigenous Learning Lab, addressing Ojibwe youth in Wisconsin. Bird Bear also co-created the UW-Madison First Nations Cultural Landscape Tour and WisconsinFirstNations.org to help Pre-K–12 educators teach the 12 Native Nations of Wisconsin. Bird Bear earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington–Seattle and a master’s degree from UW–Madison.

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