Sequoia Nagamatsu is our ArmadilloCon 2023 Guest of Honor!
Writer, professor and editor Sequoia Nagamatsu is the author of the national bestselling novel How High We Go in the Dark (HarperCollins, 2022).
- How High We Go in the Dark was a New York Times Book Review editor’s Choice Selection. “‘If you’re a short-story lover — as I am — you’ll be impressed with Nagamatsu’s meticulous craft,’ Lincoln Michel writes in his review” (“In a Virus-Stricken Future, Humanity Endures Amid the Grief“).
- It was named as one of just two finalists for the 2022 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. The jury stated, “An ingenious suite of interlocking stories depicting grief, bereavement and love via the progress of an all-too-plausible pandemic and its decades-long aftermath. This brave, inventive novel is a testament to the human spirit and the resilience of hope in the face of tragedy. In connection, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s characters find redemption, meaning and a future.”
- It was a February 2022 Indie Next Pick.
- It was the March 2022 pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club!
- It was shortlisted for the 2022 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the 2022 Barnes and Noble Discover Prize.
- It was longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the 2023 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel.
Sequoia Nagamatsu’s previous book is the Japanese folklore and pop culture inspired story story collection, Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone (Black Lawrence Press, 2016).
These stories are wonderfully strange, something we think ArmadilloCon fans will appreciate! They include “The Return to Monsterland,” the story of a biologist whose wife calls him as she is about to die because Godzilla has grabbed the train car she is in. “You should be here; he’s simply magnificent,” she says.
Sequoia has published a number of short stories. “Headwater LLC” appeared in the January 2015 issue of Lightspeed, along with an Author Spotlight piece. Other short works have appeared in publications such as Conjunctions (“The Return to Monsterland”), The Southern Review (“Elegy Hotel”), ZYZZYVA (“Rokurokubi”), Tin House, Iowa Review (“Grave Friends”), and One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories.
He has been listed as notable in Best American Non-Required Reading and the Best Horror of the Year.
For ten years, Sequoia co-edited Pyschopomp Magazine with Cole Bucciaglia. Psychpomp championed genre pushing and experimental work. (The Psychopomp archives are still available!)
He was educated at Grinnell College (BA) and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (MFA), and he teaches creative writing at Saint Olaf College and the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA program. He is originally from O’ahu, Hawaiʻi and the San Francisco Bay Area and currently lives in Minneapolis with his wife, the writer Cole Nagamatsu, their cat Kalahira, their real dog Fenris, and a Sony Aibo robot dog named Calvino. He is at work on two other novels. His next novel, Girl Zero, is forthcoming from William Morrow/HarperCollins and Bloomsbury UK in 2024.