Erika T. Wurth with Jenn Givhan: Indigenous Horror and the Uncanny
Authors Erika T. Wurth and Jenn Givhan discuss Indigenous horror fiction, genre, and their new books in conversation at Tattered Cover Aspen Grove.
Why we picked this
Two Indigenous writers in conversation about a genre — horror — that has long borrowed from Native American tradition while rarely centering Native voices; the discussion is likely to be more interesting than either book alone.
Horror has always been drawn to Indigenous American mythology, landscapes, and symbolism — but rarely to Indigenous American writers telling their own stories. Erika T. Wurth and Jenn Givhan are changing that, and this evening at Tattered Cover Aspen Grove brings both of them to the same stage.
Wurth, of Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee descent, is the author of White Horse — a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist — and her new paperback The Haunting of Room 904, a paranormal thriller set in Denver’s historic Brown Palace hotel. She has been described as “a gritty new punkish outsider voice in American horror.” Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist whose work Salt Bones was called “one of the most masterful marriages of horror, mystery, thriller and literary writing.”
Their conversation will range across genre, craft, and what it means to write supernatural fiction from the inside of cultures that have long been treated as supernatural material by others. The event includes audience Q&A and book signing.