Brandon Hobson, The Removed

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The Removed can be purchased from CW here

Crooked Hallelujah can be purchased from CW here

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. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer’s in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation.

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—Maria attempts to call the family together from their physical and emotional distances once more. But as the bonfire draws near, each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life and the spirit world. Maria and Ernest take in a foster child who seems to almost miraculously keep Ernest’s mental fog at bay. Sonja becomes dangerously fixated on a man named Vin, despite—or perhaps because of—his ties to tragedy in her lifetime and lifetimes before. And in the wake of a suicide attempt, Edgar finds himself in the mysterious Darkening Land: a place between the living and the dead, where old atrocities echo.

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.

About the Authors:

Dr. Brandon Hobson is the author of the novel, The Removed, as well as Where the Dead Sit Talking, which was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award and winner of the Reading the West Award. He received his PhD in English/creative writing from Oklahoma State University. His fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such places as McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, NOON, and elsewhere. Hobson is an assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University and also teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma. brandonhobson.com

Kelli Jo Ford

Plimpton Prize winner, Crooked Hallelujah has garnered rave reviews and numerous award nominations, rated as "Top 10 New Books" by the New York Times. 

Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, the Everett Southwest Literary Award, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Award at Bread Loaf, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, among other places. In addition to her work as a freelance writer and editor, she teaches fiction at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA program. kellijoford.com