Eric Gansworth

How about a book that makes you barge into your boss's office to read a page of poetry from? That you dream of? That every movie, song, book, moment that follows continues to evoke in some way? The term "Apple" is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly "red on the outside, white on the inside." Eric Gansworth is telling his story in Apple (Skin to the Core). The story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds. Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.

(Skin to the Core)

Apple

A powerful new book from Eric Gansworth, author of If I Ever Get Out of Here, that speaks the truth on race, relationships, and rock from two unforgettable perspectives.

Give Me Some Truth

My Good Man

Lewis "Shoe" Blake is used to the joys and difficulties of life on the Tuscarora Indian reservation in 1975: the joking, the Fireball games, the snow blowing through his roof. What he's not used to is white people being nice to him -- people like George Haddonfield, whose family recently moved to town with the Air Force. As the boys connect through their mutual passion for music, especially the Beatles, Lewis has to lie more and more to hide the reality of his family's poverty from George. He also has to deal with the vicious Evan Reininger, who makes Lewis the special target of his wrath. But when everyone else is on Evan's side, how can he be defeated? And if George finds out the truth about Lewis's home -- will he still be his friend? Acclaimed adult author Eric Gansworth makes his YA debut with this wry and powerful novel about friendship, memory, and the joy of rock 'n' roll.

If I Ever Get Out of Here

David Robertson

Darcie Little Badger

Monique Gray Smith

Cynthia Leitich Smith

Marcella Bell

Kate Hart

Brian Young

Andrea L. Rogers

Jen Ferguson

Cheryl Isaacs

Byron Graves

Angeline Boulley

K.A. Cobell

Christine Derr

A.J. Eversole

Karina Iceberg

Featuring the voices of both new and acclaimed Indigenous writers and edited by bestselling Muscogee author Cynthia Leitich Smith, this collection of interconnected stories serves up laughter, love, Native pride, and the world’s best frybread.

The road to Sandy June's Legendary Frybread Drive-In slips through every rez and alongside every urban Native hangout. The menu offers a rotating feast, including traditional eats and tasty snacks. But Sandy June's serves up more than it hosts live music, movie nights, unexpected family reunions, love long lost, and love found again.

That big green-and-gold neon sign beckons to teens of every tribal Nation, often when they need it most.

Featuring stories and poems Kaua Mahoe Adams, Marcella Bell, Angeline Boulley, K. A. Cobell, A. J. Eversole, Jen Ferguson, Eric Gansworth, Byron Graves, Kate Hart, Christine Hartman Derr, Karina Iceberg, Cheryl Isaacs, Darcie Little Badger, David A. Robertson, Andrea L. Rogers, Cynthia Leitich Smith, and Brian Young.

In partnership with We Need Diverse Books.

Legendary Frybread Drive-In

A literary tour-de-force sure to turn the coming-of-age genre on its head from Printz honor author, Eric Gansworth Brian, a 20-something reporter on the Niagara Cascade’s City Desk, is navigating life as the only Indigenous writer in the newsroom, being lumped into reporting on stereotypical stories that homogenize his community, the nearby Tuscarora reservation. But when a mysterious roadside assault lands Tim, the brother of Brian’s mother’s late boyfriend in the hospital, Brian must pick up the threads of a life that he’s abandoned. The narrative takes us through Brian’s childhood and slice of life stories on the reservation, in Gansworth’s signature blend of crystal sharp, heartfelt literary realist prose. But perhaps more importantly, it takes us through Brian’s attempt to balance himself between Haudenosaunee and American life, between the version of his story that would prize the individual over all else and the version of himself that depends on the entire community’s survival.

Echoing the muscular rhythms of the heart beat, the poems in this stunning collection alternate between contraction and expansion. Eric Gansworth explores the act of enduring, physically, historically, and culturally. A member of the Haudenosaunee tribe, Gansworth expresses the tensions experienced by members of a marginalized culture struggling to maintain tradition within a much larger dominant culture. With equal measures of humor, wisdom, poignancy, and beauty, Gansworth’s poems mine the infinite varieties of individual and collective loss and recovery. Fourteen paintings punctuate his poetry, creating an active dialogue between word and image steeped in the tradition of the mythic Haudenosaunee world. A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function is the most recent addition to Gansworth’s remarkable body of work chronicling the lives of upstate New York’s Indian communities.

Poems and Paintings

A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function

Eric Gansworth

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