Greg Sarris & Obi Kaufmann at Clio's Books
Join Heyday and Clio's Books for this event with Greg Sarris and Obi Kaufmann, discussing Sarris's new novel The Last Human Bear.
Set against the backdrop of 20th-century California Indian country, Sarris’ novel transports readers to migrant field worker camps, Depression-era rancherias, and cinematic Sonoma landscapes to follow the life journey of Mary Hatcher, a Native Pomo woman of unbow-able spirit. Forged in tragedy and endowed with peculiar secrets from her Coast Miwok stepmother, Mary comes of age an outcast among her own people, rumored to be a tolik—a poisoner, a shapeshifter, and the last of her kind.
A mystery even to herself, Mary passes between Native and white societies, carving a path against the twin headwinds of prejudice and poverty toward hard-fought independence. A life of defiant trysts and turns, two loves, and one curse culminate in a haunting final act for which Mary must unburden herself in order to die: “That’s why I’m talking. I can’t go on until I pass on this business.”
With The Last Human Bear Sarris delivers an unforgettable protagonist surrounded by a lucidly realized cast of characters. Offering an engrossing rejoinder to the paucity of fiction centering California’s first peoples, Mary’s story—textured with code-switching, old world lore, and a quiet enchantment with the more-than-human world—illuminates her times and introduces a voice to American fiction that has been conspicuously absent.
Greg Sarris is an author, university professor, and tribal leader currently serving his seventeenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. His publications include Keeping Slug Woman Alive, Grand Avenue, Watermelon Nights, How a Mountain Was Made, Becoming Story, and The Forgetters. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Sundance Institute, former board chair of the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, and a member of the Board of Regents for the University of California. Greg lives and works in Sonoma County, California.
Obi Kaufmann is the author of The California Field Atlas, The State of Water, The Forests of California, The Coasts of California, The Deserts of California, and State of Fire. His forthcoming book, California Inside Out, debuts September 2026.
Greg Sarris at City Light Books
City Lights and Heyday Books celebrate the publication of
This event will take place in Kerouac Alley, located between City Lights and Vesuvio Cafe. It is free to the public. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Widely acclaimed storyteller Greg Sarris (author of Grand Avenue and Watermelon Nights) debuts his first novel in twenty-eight years with The Last Human Bear, marking the triumphant return of a writer hailed by Kirkus as “a singularly talented novelist.”
Set against the backdrop of 20th-century California Indian country, Sarris’ novel transports readers to migrant field worker camps, Depression-era rancherias, and cinematic Sonoma landscapes to follow the life journey of Mary Hatcher, a Native Pomo woman of unbow-able spirit. Forged in tragedy and endowed with peculiar secrets from her Coast Miwok stepmother, Mary comes of age an outcast among her own people, rumored to be a tolik—a poisoner, a shapeshifter, and the last of her kind.
A mystery even to herself, Mary passes between Native and white societies, carving a path against the twin headwinds of prejudice and poverty toward hard-fought independence. A life of defiant trysts and turns, two loves, and one curse culminate in a haunting final act for which Mary must unburden herself in order to die: “That’s why I’m talking. I can’t go on until I pass on this business.”
With The Last Human Bear Sarris delivers an unforgettable protagonist surrounded by a lucidly realized cast of characters. Offering an engrossing rejoinder to the paucity of fiction centering California’s first peoples, Mary’s story—textured with code-switching, old world lore, and a quiet enchantment with the more-than-human world—illuminates her times and introduces a voice to American fiction that has been conspicuously absent.
Rendered with a “touch that is both delicate and vivid,” says Copperfield’s book buyer Sheryl Cotleur, “this novel is so much more rich and complicated than a few words can express, and it is so very worth it to discover that in the reading.”
Greg Sarris is an accomplished author, university professor, and tribal leader currently serving his seventeenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. His publications include Keeping Slug Woman Alive, Grand Avenue, Watermelon Nights, How a Mountain Was Made, Becoming Story, and The Forgetters. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Sundance Institute, former board chair of the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, and a member of the Board of Regents for the University of California. Greg Sarris lives and works in Sonoma County, California. Visit his website at greg-sarris.com.
Oscar Villalon is the editor of ZYZZYVA, winner of a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize in 2022. His writing has been published in Stranger’s Guide, Freeman’s, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. He and his family live in San Francisco.
Greg Sarris and Rebecca Solnit at Copperfield's Books
On July 16, join Copperfield's in welcoming Sonoma's own Greg Sarris, author of The Last Human Bear for a book talk and conversation with Rebecca Solnit. This special ticketed event will take place at the Finley Community Center, bringing together community, story, and a rare literary homecoming.
Greg Sarris is an enrolled member of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and is currently serving his seventeenth consecutive elected term as chairman of the tribe. He is the author of several books, including the novel Grand Avenue, which he adapted for an HBO miniseries and co-executive produced with Robert Redford; the novel Watermelon Nights; Weaving the Dream, a biography of Mabel McKay; Becoming Story, a memoir; and the story collections How a Mountain Was Made and The Forgetters. Formerly a full professor of English at UCLA, Sarris serves on the University of California Board of Regents and the Sundance Institute Board, and he holds the Distinguished Emeritus Graton Endowed Chair in Native American Studies at Sonoma State University. He lives in Sonoma County, California.
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 25 books, including Orwell's Roses, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the boards of Oil Change International and Third Act. Her newsletter of essays and analyses can be found at meditationsinanemergency.com.
Greg Sarris at the Center for Fiction
Join Heyday author Greg Sarris at the Center for Fiction, taking part in the panel "Indigenous Narratives of the Past, Present, and Future." This event is ticketed.
Long before the first Europeans set foot on Turtle Island, Indigenous people shared and recorded their stories and histories. In a conversation moderated by scholar Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee), novelists Eliana Ramage (Cherokee) and Greg Sarris (Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria), along with historian Linford D. Fisher, will consider Native literature from cultural, anthropological, and fictional perspectives. As many commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the authors will offer a clear-eyed examination of America’s past while celebrating Indigenous presents and futures.
This panel will bring together Fisher’s rich account of the long history of Indigenous enslavement and land dispossession; Ramage’s and Sarris’s fictional depictions of a Depression-era shape-shifter and a modern-day aspiring Cherokee astronaut, respectively; and Pierce’s theorization of future worlds and imaginaries that illuminate Indigenous thought and practice. A book signing will follow the event.
Greg Sarris is an accomplished author, university professor, and tribal leader currently serving his seventeenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. His publications include Keeping Slug Woman Alive, Grand Avenue, Watermelon Nights, How a Mountain Was Made, Becoming Story, and The Forgetters. In June 2026 his new novel, The Last Human Bear, will debut. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Sundance Institute, former board chair of the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, and a member of the Board of Regents for the University of California. Greg lives and works in Sonoma County, California. Visit his website at greg-sarris.com.
Greg Sarris at the Bay Area Book Festival
Join Heyday author Greg Sarris for an exclusive early book launch event at this year's Bay Area Book Festival. Joined in conversation by Susan Straight, Sarris will be discussing his forthcoming novel The Last Human Bear, an epic story that spans generations about a Pomo woman who is haunted by an inescapable tradition that has been passed down from her stepmother.
Greg Sarris is an enrolled member of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and is currently serving his seventeenth consecutive elected term as chairman of the tribe. He is the author of several books, including the novel Grand Avenue, which he adapted for an HBO miniseries and co-executive produced with Robert Redford; the novel Watermelon Nights; Weaving the Dream, a biography of Mabel McKay; Becoming Story, a memoir; and the story collections How a Mountain Was Made and The Forgetters. Formerly a full professor of English at UCLA, Sarris serves on the University of California Board of Regents and the Sundance Institute Board, and he holds the Distinguished Emeritus Graton Endowed Chair in Native American Studies at Sonoma State University. He lives in Sonoma County, California. (Photo by Beowulf Sheehan)
Debuts April 2024 — The Forgetters
An Enchanting Story Cycle Traces Tales of California Indians from the Missions to Modern-Day, Recalling Timeless Truths
Award-winning author and long-time tribal chairman Greg Sarris debuts an incantatory new fiction collection rooted in the ancestral homelands of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo.
“Greg Sarris once again tells us a story filled with stories that lift the spirits in troubled times. A wonderful read that transports us to a realm of beauty, kindness, and love of life.”
—ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
BERKELEY, CALIF. — Celebrated storyteller and tribal leader Greg Sarris offers a contemplative and enchanting story cycle in The Forgetters (April 2024), a collection that blends into an unsuspected harmony shimmering dream trance with waking life, human and animal forms, and eras bygone and still-to-come. Borrowing from the cadence of Native American creation stories and the quiet enchantment of magical realism, these tales combine to reveal the foibles and folly that beset us and the lessons that recall us to ourselves and the world.
The Forgetters excavates multilayered tales of California’s Indigenous exiles, camp workers, shapeshifters, and medicine people as they interweave with the paths of settlers, migrants, and other wayfarers across the arc of recent centuries and beyond. Narrated by the enigmatic crow sisters, Question Woman and Answer Woman (who first appeared in Sarris’ 2017 How a Mountain Was Made—lauded as “a stunning array of […] contemporary allegories” by the Los Angeles Review of Books), this collection returns to Sonoma Mountain and traverses the homelands of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo. Rooted in today’s Marin and Sonoma counties, these transporting tales glimmer with an intimate connection to place and past—from ancient mythic time when all the animals were people to a speculative future when the people return as environmental refugees to the mountain from which they came.
“Greg Sarris once again tells us a story filled with stories that lift the spirits in troubled times,” says Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. “[The Forgetters is] a wonderful read that transports us to a realm of beauty, kindness, and love of life.”
This collection of tales, interwoven with the memorable banter of the crow sisters, chimes a moral chord that reminds us why we need each other, that all our stories are connected, and that the words we remember become the words we live by—and to forget them is to risk peril. Heralded as a “fine storyteller” by former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, Sarris’ latest is a triumph of craft that showcases the enduring power of story to make and remake our world anew.
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano
Marketing & Publicity Director, Heyday
Isabella Nugent
Publicist, Page One Media
For review copies, feature interest, and interview and image requests, get in touch: publicity@heydaybooks.com and/or isabella@page1m.com
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Greg Sarris is an accomplished author, university professor, and tribal leader serving his sixteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and his first term as board chair of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. His political activism in the 1990s culminated in the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act, which he co-authored, providing federal recognition and associated rights to the Coast Miwok and Pomo Native Americans of California, including the restoration of land to the Tribe, which had been without a homeland for over fifty years.
Sarris graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English from the University of California, Los Angeles and received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford. He has taught English, American and American Indian Literature, and Creative Writing at UCLA, Stanford, Loyola Marymount University, and Sonoma State University. Currently, he serves as a member of the Board of Regents for the University of California and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sarris is also a producer, playwright, and the author of several books, including the award-winning How a Mountain Was Made (2017), Kirkus Book Prize finalist Becoming Story (2022), and Grand Avenue (1995), which was adapted to an HBO film, co-produced by Sarris with Robert Redford. He is co-executive producer of Joan Baez: I Am A Noise (2023) and his most recent play, Citizen (2023) debuted at San Francisco’s Word for Word theater and was lauded as a “lush […] linguistic feast” by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Literature Live Around the World featuring Greg Sarris
Running live on February 5th and streaming worldwide, the Literature Live Around the World event hosted by LitFest Bergen features important voices from the world-over—Jaipur to Perth to Shanghai to the finale event featuring Heyday author Greg Sarris in Berkeley, California.
Tribal leader and author of How a Mountain Was Made and the forthcoming Kirkus starred review title, Becoming Story, Greg Sarris will reflect on the rise of Native American literature in the United States.
With interlocutor Cherilyn Parsons, founder and director of the Bay Area Book Festival, Sarris will discuss the rich oral storytelling tradition of Native American cultures and its emanations in modern-day Native-authored literature across fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Greg Sarris's Becoming Story Debuts Spring 2022
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A Powerful Memoir about Homeland and Belonging from Award-Winning Author and Tribal Leader Greg Sarris
Debuting with an international author tour in 2022, Greg Sarris presents Becoming Story, a memoir about his own life, written with intimacy, candor, and grace.
BERKELEY, CALIF— “These meditations enchant,” says the San Francisco Chronicle in praise of Becoming Story: A Journey among Seasons, Places, Trees, and Ancestors (on-sale April 5)—a new book from celebrated storyteller and tribal leader Greg Sarris. In this work, Sarris offers a searching portrait of his own life, from his upbringing in Santa Rosa’s Indian Country to the discovery of his own Indigenous ancestry to his work as an elected leader of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo tribes.
Sarris's acclaimed storytelling skills (Grand Avenue, Watermelon Nights, How a Mountain Was Made) are in top form in this new work, in which he weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative of becoming one’s self, underscoring the immense power of story in our lives—as individuals, as a community, and as inheritors of ancestors long past. “He invites us into an intimate and communal California Indian world,” says Theresa Gregor, Professor of American Indian Studies, and “reminds us that the roots of our tribal identities ‘remember’ and, ultimately, restore(y) us.”
Slated to be read alongside works by Tommy Orange, Annie Proulx, David Treuer, Barry Lopez, and Terese Marie Mailhot, Sarris—regarded as a leading voice for California Indian communities (see his recent remarks in this front-page New York Times article)—offers reflections in Becoming Story on belonging to the place where you live in prose that is searching, and profound. In a starred review, Kirkus heralds Becoming Story as "a fascinating and evocative memoir in essays" while Foreword Reviews describes Sarris' memoir as "resonant" testimony "to the impacts of people on the land" that "lauds the power of language when it comes to leaving tracks for others to follow."
Sarris’s new book will debut to an international audience streaming from the Literature Live Around the World event from LitFest Bergen in February, with features to follow at Politics & Prose (Washington D.C.), the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and the Bay Area Book Festival (Berkeley, Calif.), among other venues. The debut of Sarris’s Becoming Story will also dovetail with the 10th anniversary of Heyday’s Roundhouse program, devoted to bringing to print books about and by California's Native voices.
Media Contact:
Kalie Caetano, Marketing & Publicity
publicity@heydaybooks.com
For review copies, feature interest, and interview and image requests, get in touch!
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For Coast Miwok people, like all Indigenous peoples of central California, the landscape was nothing less than a richly layered text, a sacred book.
—Becoming Story
About Greg Sarris
“These are charming and wise stories, simply told, to be enjoyed by young and old alike.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An important American novel and an increasingly relevant work for resisting a political and cultural economy that privileges protest and encourages forgetting for the sake of belonging.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Wonderful . . . . Vibrant testimony to the survival of American Indians and the power of the old spirits.”
—Leslie Marmon Sillko
“I admire Greg Sarris’s sense of the gritty passion of life. A resonant thread of myth and laughter pulls the tales together. He allows the story to overtake him, the sign of a fine storyteller.”
—Joy Harjo
Greg Sarris is an accomplished author, university professor, and tribal leader serving his fifteenth consecutive term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. His political activism in the 1990s culminated in the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act, co-authored by Sarris, which gained federal recognition and restored all associated rights to the Coast Miwok and Pomo Native Americans of California. The law also restored land to the Tribe, who had been without a homeland for over fifty years. To date, the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria remain the last tribe in the United States to be restored by an Act of Congress. In addition to his elected role as Chairman of the Tribe, Sarris also serves as President of the Tribe’s Economic Development Board, overseeing all of the Tribe’s business interests, including the Graton Resort and Casino, which today ranks among the five most successful Indian casinos in the nation.
Sarris graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English from UCLA and received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. While at Stanford, he was honored with the Walter Gore Award for excellence in teaching. He has taught as a full professor of English at UCLA, as the Fletcher Jones Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University, and as the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria Endowed Chair at Sonoma State University, where he taught courses in writing and American and American Indian Literatures. He has been appointed to the Board of Trustees for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In addition to his work as a professor, businessman, and leader, Sarris has also enjoyed a prolific creative career as an author, producer, and playwright. His several books include the award-winning collection How a Mountain Was Made and the moving biography of world-renowned Pomo basket weaver and medicine woman Mabel McKay. He has also published the widely anthologized collection of essays Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indians Texts as well as the co-edited volume Approaches to Teaching the Work of Louise Erdrich (with Connie A. Jacobs and James B. Giles). His fiction includes the recently reissued novel Watermelon Nights and the short story collection Grand Avenue, which was adapted to an HBO miniseries, co-executive produced by Sarris alongside Robert Redford. He co-produced, advised, and featured in American Passages a sixteen-part series on American literature for Public Television, which received the Hugo Award for Best Documentary in 2003. In addition to developing pilot scripts for Showtime and HBO, Sarris has worked on scripts for the Sundance Institute, where he also supported the development of a summer writing lab for American Indians interested in film writing. Sarris has also adapted his work and written original plays for stage productions at Pieces of The Quilt, Intersection Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, and others. His play, Mission Indians, which debuted in San Francisco, received the 2003 Bay Area Theatre Critics Award for Best Script.
Currently Sarris is executive producing a documentary of Joan Baez and finishing work on his new novel. His latest book, Becoming Story: A Journey among Seasons, Places, Trees, and Ancestors considers the deep past, historical traumas, and possible futures of his homeland. Learn more about his work at greg-sarris.com.
