Morgan Talty

Night of the Living Rez, twelve linked stories published in 2022, was Morgan Talty's first book. Talty, born in 1991, is a citizen of the Penobscot Nation and grew up on Indian Island, the reservation sitting in the middle of the Penobscot River in Maine, where the stories take place. David narrates, a Penobscot boy in the earlier stories and a man in his twenties, called Dee, in the later ones, moving through a household strained by addiction and illness and held together by jokes. The collection won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, and reached the shortlists for the Story Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Talty graduated from Dartmouth, took an MFA through the Stonecoast programme, and teaches creative writing and Native American literature at Orono in Maine. Fire Exit, his first novel, followed in 2024.