BOOK CLUB 101
While we can’t gather in the theater, we’re taking select book clubs online. Join us via Zoom for Virtual Book Club. RSVP with your e-mail address so we can send you the Zoom link on the day of the event. How does it work? After a brief introduction, we will shift participants into self-led breakout rooms, in groups of about 10, so everyone can participate in a discussion before coming back to the main room to wrap up. Need a copy of the book? Order a copy from our bookshop.org list, and NYU Skirball will receive a portion of the proceeds.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Office of Global Inclusion and Diversity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree/nehiyaw, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is the author of the novel Jonny Appleseed (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the poetry collection full-metal indigiqueer (Talonbooks, 2017) and the winner of the Governor General’s History Award for the Indigenous Arts and Stories Challenge in 2016. He is also the editor of Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, publishing in fall 2020. Currently he is working on a PhD in Indigenous Literatures and Cultures in the University of Calgary’s English department (Treaty 7).
ABOUT THE BOOK
LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER
“You’re gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine” is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling debut novel by poet Joshua Whitehead.
Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the “rez”–and his former life–to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The seven days that follow are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny’s life is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages–and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life.
Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of First Nations life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.
