Sequoia Nagamatsu

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).

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.