In this episode, we discuss the life and work of poet and novelist James Welch. Part Blackfeet and part Gros Ventre, Welch grew up on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations in Montana and graduated from the University of Montana, where he studied writing under poet Richard Hugo.
Welch was the author of the novels Winter in the Blood, The Death of Jim Loney, Fools Crow (for which he received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, an American Book Award, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award), The Indian Lawyer, and The Heartsong of Charging Elk. Welch also wrote a nonfiction book, Killing Custer: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians, and a work of poetry, Riding the Earthboy 40.
Themes of identity and conflict reverberate throughout Welch’s work. In the novel Fools Crow (1986), set during the 1870s, a young Blackfeet debates assimilation to white culture. Welch, wrote Don Lee in Ploughshares, made “it his lifework…to illuminate the richness of his culture and the heartache of its dislocation.”
For this episode, we are joined by New York Times bestselling novelist Stephen Graham Jones, most recently the author of I Was A Teenage Slasher. You can read more about Stephen below.
Stephen is interviewed by Nate King, Digital Content Associate at the American Writers Museum. This conversation originally took place November 15, 2024 and was recorded over Zoom.
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES is the NYT bestselling author of nearly thirty novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Stephen’s been an NEA recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the August Derleth British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, the Western Literature Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award, the American Library Association’s RUSA Award and Alex Award, the 2023 American Indian Festival of Words Writers Award, the Locus Award, four Bram Stoker Awards, three Shirley Jackson Awards, and six This is Horror Awards. Stephen’s also been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, he’s been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and the Eisner Award, and he’s made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Horror Novels.
He’s the guy who wrote Mongrels, The Only Good Indians, My Heart is a Chainsaw, Earthdivers, and I Was a Teenage Slasher. Up next are True Believers, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, and Killer on the Road. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado.