May 18, 2021
The D/N/Lakota Project Book Club
As Cornerstone Theater Company prepare to visit South Dakota this summer for The D/N/Lakota Project, we’re reading David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s acclaimed novel Winter Counts, a thriller set on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
We invite you to read the book and join us on June 17th at 5:30PM PT (on Zoom) for a conversation between David Weiden and playwright Larissa FastHorse, moderated by Cornerstone board member Clementine Bordeaux, all of whom are enrolled citizens of the Sicangu Lakota Nation.
Click here to reserve your place!
Support Indigenous-owned bookstores:
Bird Cage Books and Mercantile (Rapid City, South Dakota)
Red Planet Books and Comics (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Birchbark Books (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
About the writers:
David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, is the author of the novel Winter Counts (Ecco, 2020), nominated for the Edgar Award, Anthony Award, Barry Award, Thriller Award, and the Hammett Prize. The book was the winner of the Lefty Award for Best Debut Mystery Novel and the Spur Award for Best Contemporary Novel. The novel was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, main selection of the Book of the Month Club, and named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and other magazines. He’s the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, a Ragdale Foundation residency, the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship, and was a Tin House Scholar. He’s professor of Native American studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver and lives in Denver, Colorado, with his family.
Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota Nation) is a 2020 MacArthur Fellow, award winning writer/choreographer, and co-founder of Indigenous Direction, the nation’s leading consulting company for Indigenous arts and audiences. Her satirical comedy, The Thanksgiving Play (Playwrights Horizons/Geffen Playhouse), was named one of the top ten most produced plays in America. She is the first Native American playwright in the history of theater on that list. Additional plays include What Would Crazy Horse Do? (KCRep), Landless and Cow Pie Bingo (AlterTheater), Teaching Disco Squaredancing to Our Elders: a Class Presentation (Native Voices at the Autry), Vanishing Point (Eagle Project), and Cherokee Family Reunion (Mountainside Theater). She is in development on theater, film, and TV products around the country. Larissa also created the nationally recognized trilogy of community engaged theatrical experiences with Cornerstone Theater Company. The first was Urban Rez, the second project, Native Nation, was the largest Indigenous theater production in the history of American theater with over 400 Native artists involved in the production. Their current project, The D/N/Lakota Project is set in Larissa’s homelands of South Dakota. She and her collaborator, Michael John Garcés, spend years on each project in an Indigenized community engagement process. “The engagement itself is the art form.”
Clementine Bordeaux is an enrolled member of the Sičáŋǧu Lakótapi (Rosebud Sioux Tribe) who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. She received a bachelor’s degree in Theatre/Communication from Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a Master’s degree in Communication from the University of Washington, Seattle in The Native Voice Indigenous Documentary Film Program and worked for six years as the Academic Coordinator for the American Indian Studies Interdepartmental Program at UCLA where she is currently completing a PhD.
