Milkweed Books presents Carson Faust

Milkweed Books presents Carson Faust, author of the novel IF THE DEAD BELONG HERE. ABOUT THE BOOK When a young girl goes missing, the ghosts of the past collide with her family’s secrets in a mesmerizing Native American Southern Gothic When six-year-old Laurel Taylor vanishes without a trace, her family is left shattered, struggling to navigate the darkness of grief and unanswered questions. As their search turns to despair, Laurel’s older sister, Nadine, begins experiencing nightmares that blur the line between dream and reality, and she becomes convinced that Laurel’s disappearance could be connected to other family tragedies. Guided by her elders, Nadine sets out to uncover whether laying the ghosts to rest is the key to finding her sister and healing her fractured family. Carson Faust captivates in this chilling literary debut that confronts the specter of colonization and the generational scars it leaves on Native American families. Steeped in Indigenous folklore and drawing from the author’s own family history, If the Dead Belong Here examines what it means to be haunted—both by the supernatural and by terrors of our own making. Faust crafts a powerful, kaleidoscopic tale about the complicated legacies of violence that shape our present, the importance of honoring our past, and the resilience of a family—and a people—determined to heal from old wounds. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Carson Faust is two-spirit and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina. He is the recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Jerome Foundation. His fiction has appeared in Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology. He lives in Minnesota. Sequoia Nagamatsu is the author of the novel, How High We Go in the Dark, a national bestseller and New York Times Editors' Choice, as well as the story collection, Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone. His work has been a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize and The Locus Award, short listed for The Barnes and Noble Discover Prize and The Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Pen/Hemingway Award. He currently teaches at St. Olaf College and serves as a faculty mentor in the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program based at Pacific Lutheran University.