The Ethics of Now: Tommy Orange

Tommy Orange arrived like a firebrand last year with his debut novel There There, a sprawling, ambitious opus on identity and experience. The book begins with an opening essay that Orange describes as a “prayer from hell,” and then goes on to closely follow twelve Native American characters, Faulkner-style, as they travel to the Big Oakland Powwow. Orange is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma who attended the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts; he writes that the Pulitzer-nominated book was written with an intention to “counter to the way the American narrative has been told.” He kicks off the Kenan Institute for Ethics’ annual “Ethics of Now” series with a conversation with Duke’s Adriane Lentz-Smith.