THE MISSING MORNINGSTAR
And Other Stories
by Stacie Shannon Denetsosie
Stacie Shannon Denetsosie confronts long-reaching effects of settler-colonialism on Native lives in a series of gritty, wildly imaginative stories. A young Navajo man catches a ride home alongside a casket he’s sure contains his dead grandfather. A gas station clerk witnesses the kidnapping of the newly crowned Miss Northwestern Arizona. A young couple’s search for a sperm donor raises questions of blood quantum. This debut collection grapples with a complex and painful history alongside an inheritance of beauty, ceremony, and storytelling.
September 2023 | Fiction | 9781948814850 | 144 pp | $16.95
PRAISE FOR THE MISSING MORNINGSTAR
“Stacie Shannon Denetsosie has given us insight and honesty on what it is to be Navajo now.”
—CALVIN CROSBY, The King’s English Bookshop
“In Stacie Denetsosie’s ground-breaking story collection The Missing Morningstar, characters voyage across Navajo Nation on foot, in cars and trucks, even by hearse, searching for mothers, grandparents, siblings, and lost girls. But they are not searching for a lost past. Rather, their voices—each urgent and singular—open up a multitude of presents and futures. These are characters I fell in love with, and a storyteller I can’t wait to read more from.”
—KRISTIANA KAHAKAUWILA, author of This is Paradise: Stories
“Two thirds heartbreak, one third redemption, these stories of contemporary life in and around the Navajo Reservation bear all the generational trauma of colonialism and all the hope and humor of the people who live between the four sacred peaks.”
—PAM HOUSTON, author of Air Mail and Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country
“These characters mirror the high desert landscape from which they hail: stark, resilient, beautiful. Denetsosie shouts her stories of everyday life on the Rez into the literary canon and the white lightning echo is an invitation to read.”
—CARLA CRUJIDO, author of The Strange Beautiful
“A fantastic collection by a stunning new voice in Indigenous literature.”
—DAVID HESKA WANBLI WEIDEN, author of Winter Counts
“Illuminating, finely-crafted, bold, and honest stories in Denetsosie’s starborn prose.”
—CHELSEA T. HICKS, author of A Calm & Normal Heart
“Full of voices that reveal grief and redemption, this collection is a compelling compendium of family, truths, loss and love. Denetsosie's voice is a wonderful addition to contemporary fiction that explores Indigenous lives. I loved it.”
—BRANDON HOBSON, author of The Removed
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STACIE SHANNON DENETSOSIE is a member of the Navajo Nation and her clans are Todích'íí'nii (Bitterwater) and born for Naakaii Dine'é (Mexican). Her work has appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, Scribendi, and Phoebe. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is a contributor to the Torrey House Press anthology Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild. She lives in Logan, Utah.