Eric Gansworth

Love can be many things – all-consuming, fleeting, vengeful, selfless, toxic, uplifting, and always, a core part of the teen experience that leaves an indelible mark. This enchanting, genre-crossing anthology delivers something for every reader with unique characters, global settings, and a dazzling mixture of myth, historical, speculative, and contemporary fiction. With the turn of a page, get swept away by unexpected love blooming between two princes from enemy Mesoamerican nations in the 15th century, who'd rather make music rather than war; cheer for a timid bearded lady who was shunned by her family and runs away to find belonging and safety at the circus during the 1800s experience the heartbreak of saying goodbye to a beloved pet; breathlessly watch a myth unfold as a siren bound to the water falls in love with a winged forest spirit, their love seemingly impossible from the start. Root for a girl who emerges from grief and battles with chronic pain to discover how to love herself and life again. Love is complicated, and this anthology embraces the messiness and the joy of all kinds of love. Contributors include: Alexandra Alessandri David Bowles Melanie Crowder Margarita Engle Eric Gansworth Robin Gow Mariama J. Lockington Laura Ruby Padma Venkatraman Jasmine Warga Charles Waters Kip Wilson

It’s a rare book that can make the tried-and-true genre of the coming-of-age novel seem novel. There are the standard markers of the hero’s journey - the trials, the dark night of the soul, the lesson learned. From Printz honoree Eric Gansworth comes My Good Man, a literary tour-de-force sure to turn the genre on its head. 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 car accident under mysterious circumstances 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 resulting 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.

NOW IN PAPERBACK WINNER, AMERICAN INDIAN YOUTH LITERATURE AWARD HONOR, MICHAL L. PRINTZ AWARD LONGLIST, NATIONAL BOOK AWARD TIME 10 Best YA and Children's Books of the Year NPR Best of the Year Shelf Awareness Best of the Year Publishers Weekly Big Indie Books of Fall Amazon Best Book of the Month ​American Indians in Youth Literature Best of the Year​ CSMCL Best Multicultural Children's Books of the Year "Stirring.... Raw and moving."--TIME "Beautiful imagery and with words that soar and scald."--The Buffalo News "Easily one of the best books to be published in 2020. The kind of book bound to save lives."-- LitHub "A powerful narrative about identity and belonging." --Paste Magazine ★ "Timely and important." --Booklist (starred) ★ "Searing yet dryly funny." --The Bulletin (starred) ★ "Exceptional." --Shelf-Awareness (starred) ★​ "Captivating​." --S​chool Library Journal (starred) 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." In Apple (Skin to the Core), Eric Gansworth tells his story, 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.

NPR Best Books of the Year * Boston Globe Best Books of the Year * School Library Journal Best Books of the Year * Chicago Public Library Best Books of the Year A stirring 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. Carson Mastick is entering his senior year of high school and desperate to make his mark, on the reservation and off. A rock band -- and winning Battle of the Bands -- is his best shot. But things keep getting in the way. Small matters like the lack of an actual band, or his brother getting shot by the racist owner of a local restaurant. Maggi Bokoni has just moved back to the reservation with her family. She's dying to stop making the same traditional artwork her family sells to tourists (conceptual stuff is cooler), stop feeling out of place in her new (old) home, and stop being treated like a child. She might like to fall in love for the first time too. Carson and Maggi -- along with their friend Lewis -- will navigate loud protests, even louder music, and first love in this stirring novel about coming together in a world defined by difference.

National Book Award Longlist TIME's 10 Best YA and Children's Books of 2020 NPR's Best Book of 2020 Shelf Awareness's Best Books of 2020 Publishers Weekly's Big Indie Books of Fall Amazon's Best Book of the Month AICL Best YA Books of 2020 CSMCL Best Multicultural Children's Books of 2020 PRAISE Stirring.. Raw and moving.--TIME Beautiful imagery and with words that soar and scald.--The Buffalo News Easily one of the best books to be published in 2020. The kind of book bound to save lives.-- LitHub A powerful narrative about identity and belonging.--Paste Magazine FOUR STARRED REVIEWS ★ Timely and important. --Booklist, starred review ★ Searing yet dryly funny. --The Bulletin, starred review ★ Exceptional. --Shelf-Awareness, starred review ★ Captivating. --School Library Journal, starred review 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. In APPLE (SKIN TO THE CORE), Eric Gansworth tells his story, 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.

Now in paperback: The debut novel Laurie Halse Anderson praised for "fearlessly laying down the truth" about friendship, poverty, and the joys of rock 'n' roll. 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?

"A heart-healing, mocs-on-the-ground story of music, family and friendship." -- Cynthia Leitich Smith, author of Tantalize and Rain is Not My Indian Name. 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.

Every winter, Tommy Jack McMorsey watches the meteor showers in northern Minnesota. On the long haul from Texas to Minnesota, Tommy encounters a deluded Japanese tourist determined to find the buried ransom money from the movie Fargo. When the Japanese tourist dies of exposure in Tommy Jack's care, a media storm erupts and sets off a series of journeys into Tommy Jack's past as he remembers the horrors of Vietnam, a love affair, and the suicide of his closest friend, Fred Howkowski. Exploring with great insight and wit the ways images, stereotypes, and depictions intersect with, Extra Indians offers a powerful glimpse into contemporary Native American life.

Echoing the muscular rhythms of the heartbeat, 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, 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, polgnancy, and beauty, Gansworth's poems mine the infinite varieties of individual and collective loss and recovery. Seventeen paintings complement his poetry, creating a dialogue between word and image steeped in the tradition of the Haudenosaunee's mythic 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.

Welcome to the Seventh Annual Conference of the Society for Protection and Reclamation of Indian Images. Expect to find, amid all the refined cultural observations, academic posturing, and political maneuvering, an Indian who defies anyone to protect, let alone reclaim, her image. This is Shirley Mounter, a Tuscarora woman and the chief storyteller among the acerbic, eloquent, and often hilarious speakers who overflow the pages of this latest novel by the noted Onondaga writer Eric Gansworth. A lecture on Indian stereotypes by Shirley's daughter, art historian Annie Boans, calls forth Shirley's recollections, whose outpourings deposit us in the turbulent yet restorative waters of modern Iroquoian reservation life, always flowing and eddying around kin. Indeed, Shirley's house and land are now, after a long and bitter fight, forever lost to her in the construction of a water reservoir that feeds the government's hydroelectric plant. The story of this battle is the story of Shirley's generation and the faltering generation that follows—of violent love and losses, of children turning away only to find themselves forever negotiating the nuances of identity, of popular culture in jarring juxtaposition with the sometimes even more incredible realities of Native life. Weaving a complex narrative illustrated with his own paintings, Gansworth creates a rich, wry, and multifaceted tapestry of the intricate twists and turns of coincidence, memories, and stories that bind Native families together.