James P. Lenfestey, Coyote & Thunderbird

About this event

Join us in-store or register to watch on Zoom.

In Coyote and the Thunderbird, wildly inventive tales send Coyote across highways, powwows, cities, weddings, beaches, ballparks, and backroads in a mythic red Thunderbird, where every detour becomes a new adventure, and every joke carries a flash of wisdom. Along the way, he falls in love, loses and finds family, tangles with desire, weather, modern life, and his own legendary appetite for trouble.

Rooted in the rich tradition of Indigenous Trickster stories yet unmistakably contemporary in voice and setting, Coyote and the Thunderbird blends mythology, literary fiction, humor, satire, and spiritual play into a book that is both timeless and new. Lenfestey’s Coyote is hilarious, unruly, tender, reckless, and deeply alive—a shape-shifting presence moving through the American landscape with mischief, heartbreak, and wild insight.

With a foreword by Lewis Hyde, author of Trickster Makes This World, this collection will appeal to readers of contemporary mythology, Native and Indigenous-inspired literature, folklore, literary short fiction, and comic philosophical storytelling.

About the Author

After a career in academia, marketing communications, and journalism on the editorial board of the Star Tribune,

where he won several Page One awards for excellence, since 2000 Lenfestey has published eight collections of poems, two collections of personal essays, edited three poetry anthologies, and co-edited Robert Bly in This World (University of Minnesota Press). His haibun memoir, Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain (Milkweed Editions) was a finalist for the 2014 Minnesota Book Award. In 2020, he received the Kay Sexton Award for significant contributions and leadership in the Minnesota Literary Community. For fifteen years, he chaired the popular Literary Witnesses poetry program in Minneapolis and led a summer poetry series on Mackinac Island, Michigan. He currently serves on the boards of Red Dragonfly Press in Minnesota, the Hellbender Poetry Gathering in North Carolina, and is the founder of Poets, Writers, Musicians Against the War on the Earth. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, the journalist Susan Lenfestey. They have four children and ten grandchildren.