Leslie Marmon Silko is the author of ten books of fiction, poetry, and memoir, including Ceremony, Storyteller, Almanac of the Dead, and The Turquoise Ledge. She received a “Genius Grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 1981 and the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994. The singular achievement of Ceremony, published in 1977, secured her a place among the first rank of Native American novelists. She was recently awarded the 2020 lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Arts and Letters and the 2020 Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. 

Tommy Orange is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel There There, and the forthcoming novel Wandering Stars (2024). Orange graduated from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was a 2014 MacDowell Fellow and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He won the 2019 PEN/Hemingway prize and was a 2019 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Fiction. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California.