Audio Series: Don Mitchell

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen."  was hatched in a NYC club during BEA back in 2012. This feature requires more time and patience of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, Don Mitchell reads an excerpt from his novel A Red Woman Was Crying. Don is an ecological anthropologist, writer, and photographer, who grew up in Hilo, on the island of Hawai’i. He studied anthropology and creative writing at Stanford and earned a PhD in anthropology from Harvard. He taught anthropology for many years at a state college in Buffalo, NY. His story collection A Red Woman Was Crying (2013) takes the reader into the rich and complex internal lives of a South Pacific people called the Nagovisi, among whom he lived for several years in the 1960s and 70s. Through the narrators the reader knows the young anthropologist, himself struggling with his identity as a Vietnam-era American, who’s come to study their culture in a time of change. Don Mitchell lives in Hilo with the poet Ruth Thompson.

Click on the soundcloud link below to listen to the excerpt:






The word on A Red Woman Was Crying:

Don Mitchell's new collection of short stories, set among tribal people on Bougainville Island in the late 1960s, demystifies ethnography by turning it on its head. The narrators are Nagovisi - South Pacific rainforest cultivators - and through their eyes the reader comes to know the young American anthropologist, himself struggling with his identity as a Vietnam-era American, who's come to to study their culture in a time of change. Beautifully written, evocative, and utterly original, A Red Woman was Crying takes the reader into the rich and complex internal lives of Nagovisi -- young and old, male and female, gentle and fierce -- as they grapple with predatory miners, indifferent colonial masters, missionaries, their own changing culture, their sometimes violent past, and the "other" who has come to live with them.
*lifted from goodreads with love

Check out my review of the book here.