Thomas King

Thomas King was born in Roseville, California, in 1943. His mother was Greek, and his father was Cherokee. King’s father left his family when he was a young boy, so King has limited memories of him. King attended primary and high school in Roseville and went on to Sacramento State University. After failing his freshman year there, he worked a series of odd jobs. Eventually, he received a bachelor’s degree from Chico State University, and in 1986, he earned a PhD from the University of Utah. Beginning to take an interest in Native storytelling, King wrote his dissertation about oral literary traditions. In the 1980s, King emigrated from the United States to Canada and found employment as a professor of Native Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. In Alberta, King began to write in earnest, and he published his first novel, Medicine River, in 1990. In 1993, he published One Good Story, That One: Stories, the short story collection in which “Borders” first appeared. In the 2000s, King published several detective novels under the pseudonym Hartley GoodWeather. Later in his career, King became increasingly politically involved, writing nonfiction books about Indigenous history in Canada and even running for Parliament in 2007. For his contributions to literature, King was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2004 and promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada in 2020. He currently lives in Guelph, Ontario with his wife and their three children. Natasha Donovan, who illustrated and adapted the text of King’s short story into the graphic novel, is from Vancouver, Canada. Her mother is Métis, originating from Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan. Her father is English and Irish. Donovan holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia. Throughout the 2010s and 2020s, Donovan has illustrated graphic novels such as Surviving the City and picture books such as Classified. For the former, she won an Indigenous Voices Award in 2019. Donovan currently lives in Bellingham, Washington with her partner.