Dartmouth Book Club: “Fire Exit”

Morgan Talty ’16 is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation. He is the author most recently of the debut novel Fire Exit. His debut short story collection, Night of the Living Rez, won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the New England Book Award, the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Honor, and was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and The Story Prize. His writing has appeared in The Georgia Review, Granta, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative, Lit Hub, and elsewhere.

Talty is an assistant professor of English in Creative Writing and Native American and Contemporary Literature at the University of Maine, Orono, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing as well as the Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Levant, Maine.

Professor N. Bruce Duthu ’80 is the Samson Occom Professor and Chair of Native American & Indigenous Studies at Dartmouth College. An internationally recognized scholar of Native American law and policy, Professor Duthu joined the faculty of Arts & Sciences at Dartmouth in 2008.  He served as Dartmouth’s Associate Dean of the Faculty for International Studies & Interdisciplinary Programs.  Duthu earned his BA degree in religion and Native American Studies from Dartmouth College and his JD degree from Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans.

Professor Duthu is the author of SHADOW NATIONS: TRIBAL SOVEREIGNTY AND THE LIMITS OF LEGAL PLURALISM (Oxford University Press 2013) and AMERICAN INDIANS AND THE LAW (Viking/Penguin Press 2008) and was a contributing author of Felix S. Cohen's HANDBOOK OF FEDERAL INDIAN LAW (2005), the leading treatise in the field of federal Indian law.  His co-edited special volume of South Atlantic Quarterly, Sovereignty, Indigeneity and the Law, won the 2011 CELJ (Council of Editors of Learned Journals) award for Best Special Issue.  He co-produced the documentary feature film, Dawnland (2018) that focuses on state removal of Indian children from their families.  In 2019, Dawnland received an Emmy award for Outstanding Research.  Duthu has lectured on indigenous rights in various parts of the world, including Russia, China, Bolivia, Italy, France, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Professor Duthu is an enrolled tribal member of the United Houma Nation of Louisiana.