Get to Know Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar

By Angela Deckard and Shelby Toren, Branch Librarians

We recently kicked off On the Same Page. This year's author event, featuring Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar, will take place on April 30, 2025.

Let’s get to know our authors!

Tommy Orange is the author of two novels - There There, published in 2018, and Wandering Stars, published in 2024. His books have been nominated for a number of awards. Wandering Stars is currently a Booker Prize nominee and There There received the 2019 American Book Award was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2019!

Tommy Orange is a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma and has said that his goals when writing There There and Wandering Stars were to expand the range of what it means to be Native and to share the stories of Native people. He believes that hearing a story similar to one's own is powerful and helps people to feel that they exist and belong to a real community.

Fun facts about Tommy Orange:

He grew up playing roller hockey and competed nationally!
Growing up, he didn’t want to be a writer, and it wasn’t until he started working with a Native nonprofit teaching workshops on storytelling and at a secondhand bookstore called Gray Wolf Books that he became interested in reading and writing.
Tommy Orange has been selected as a contributor to the Future Library project. This project, which began in 2014, will culminate in an anthology of a century’s worth of secret works, printed on paper from trees planted by the artist behind the project, Katie Paterson. Orange, along with the other chosen authors, will write a manuscript that won’t be published until 2114!

Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian American poet and novelist. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, PBS Newshour and elsewhere. Kaveh Akbar has been very open about his addiction recovery and has said that writing poetry has helped his recovery.

Martyr! is his first novel and is a finalist for the National Book Award, as well as a finalist for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Fun facts about Kaveh Akbar:

When making the change from writing poetry to novels, he found that the two had very little overlap. To help himself learn narrative structure, he read two novels every week and watched a movie a day.
Not only is he a poet, he is also married to one! Akbar married American poet Paige Lewis on June 9, 2018.
Kaveh Akbar wrote poems (alongside Ocean Vuong) for the 2018 film The Kindergarten Teacher starring Maggie Gyllenhall.

We’re so excited to welcome Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar to Michigan on April 30. Free registration is required and will open on March 17 at 9:00 AM. If you haven’t had a chance to read the books yet, you can place a hold on Martyr! and Wandering Stars.