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Michael Lionstar

A close-up of Tommy Orange.

Tommy Orange

American Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Tommy Orange will be the featured speaker at the Madison Public Library Foundation's 2024 Lunch for Libraries event. Orange’s second novel, Wandering Stars (Knopf) — a prequel and sequel to his acclaimed 2018 debut There There — was published in February as one of 2024’s most-anticipated novels. It traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of one family. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, Orange will be joined in conversation by Aaron Bird Bear, who was the inaugural director of tribal relations at UW-Madison from 2019-2023. This is a ticketed event, with proceeds helping fuel year-round author programming for the Wisconsin Book Festival; ticket sales end on April 12 at mplfoundation.org.

media release: You’re invited to join us for our 13th annual Lunch for Libraries spring fundraiser featuring award-winning author Tommy Orange! This event will be held on Tuesday, April 23, at Monona Terrace Convention Center, with check-in at 11:30 a.m. and the program running from noon–1:15 p.m. Orange will speak about his latest novel, Wandering Stars, the follow-up to his best-seller and 2019 American Book Award winner There There.

Aaron Bird Bear will serve as a conversation partner with Tommy Orange!

Tickets are going fast on this page. Lunch for Libraries tickets are $125 each. Guests are also invited to add on a Wisconsin Book Festival membership.

If you’re interested in hosting a table of eight to 10 guests, please view our Table Captain Information Sheet.

To learn about event sponsorship, view our Sponsorship Levels & Benefits document. Sponsors can be businesses, organizations, families, couples, or individuals — anyone with a love of books and reading!

In Wandering Stars, extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous — piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.

Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, Calif. He lives in Oakland with his wife and son.

Aaron Bird Bear (Mandan, Hidatsa & Diné — citizen of Three Affiliated Tribes) served as the inaugural Director of Tribal Relations at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 2019-23. In that time, Bird Bear served as co-principal investigator for an educational research project, Indigenous Learning Lab, addressing Ojibwe youth in Wisconsin. Bird Bear also co-created the UW-Madison First Nations Cultural Landscape Tour and WisconsinFirstNations.org to help Pre-K–12 educators teach the 12 Native Nations of Wisconsin. Bird Bear earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington–Seattle and a master’s degree from UW–Madison.