Book Talk: Carson Faust — If the Dead Belong Here - with Morowa Yejidé

Watch author Carson Faust's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

When six-year-old Laurel Taylor vanishes without a trace, her family is left shattered, struggling to navigate the darkness of grief and unanswered questions. As their search turns to despair, Laurel's older sister, Nadine, begins experiencing nightmares that blur the line between dream and reality, and she becomes convinced that Laurel's disappearance could be connected to other family tragedies. Guided by her elders, Nadine sets out to uncover whether laying the ghosts to rest is the key to finding her sister and healing her fractured family.

Carson Faust captivates in this chilling literary debut that confronts the specter of colonization and the generational scars it leaves on Native American families. Steeped in Indigenous folklore and drawing from the author's own family history, If the Dead Belong Here examines what it means to be haunted--both by the supernatural and by terrors of our own making. Faust crafts a powerful, kaleidoscopic tale about the complicated legacies of violence that shape our present, the importance of honoring our past, and the resilience of a family--and a people--determined to heal from old wounds.

Carson Faust is two-spirit and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina. He is the recipient of artist fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Jerome Foundation. His fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, ANMLY, and Waxwing, among other journals, and has been anthologized in Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology. He lives in Minnesota, where he works in philanthropy.

Faust is in conversation with Morowa Yejidé, a native of Washington, DC, is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Time of the Locust, which was a 2012 finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, long listed for the 2015 PEN/Bingham Prize, and a 2015 NAACP Image Award nominee. Her most recent novel, Creatures of Passage, was shortlisted for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and a 2021 Notable Book selection by NPR and the Washington Post. She lives in the DC area with her husband and three sons.

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