Tommy Orange, Presents "Pretending—An American History" at 20th Annual Anne & Loren Kieve Distinguished Lecture

On Thursday, January 30, 2025, Prize-winning author Tommy Orange visited the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) to deliver the 20th Annual Anne & Loren Kieve Distinguished Lecture. Orange, who is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, is the author of There There (2019) and its prequel/sequel Wandering Stars (2024). There There was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the American Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award and the John Leonard Prize. 

Mr. Orange began his visit to Stanford at a VIP reception in the Palm Room of the Stanford Faculty Club attended by CCSRE’s Faculty Directors, the CCSRE National Advisory Board, members of our affiliated faculty, and our numerous co-sponsors. His lecture, entitled “Pretending—An American History,” was held in the Cedar Room of the Stanford Faculty Club and was attended by over 200 people from Stanford and the greater Bay Area. He began with a short anecdote about his previous experience of working with people from Stanford before reading from his forthcoming novel. The topic of the forthcoming novel is a writer who discovers, after writing a novel about Native Americans, that he might not have any Native ancestry. Some of the questions Mr. Orange hopes to raise in the novel involve Native blood quantum, identity construction, the tendency of White Americans to “play” Indian, and what it means to be a writer.

After the reading, Mr. Orange was joined onstage by CCSRE Faculty Director Paula Moya, who engaged him in a 25-minute Q&A. Addressing his two previous books, she asked him about the origin of the title of the novel Wandering Stars and of his character names as well as about the importance of epilogues and prologues in his novel There There. After a series of questions that touched on the impact of the Residential Boarding Schools, the role of historical memory, and how he imagines his historical characters. Professor Moya concluded with a question about how he maintains hope as an artist and person living in difficult times. The conversation was wide-ranging and touched in a compelling way on the place of art during uncomfortable times.