Round Dance

Two lifelong friends navigate the loss of their friendship, grief, silence, and a sense of belonging; as a result, their urban Native community learns that no one survives life in the round alone.

Annie "Two Bits" Brown knows how to disappear in plain sight. Once vibrant, outspoken, and at home in the powwow circle, she has spent years making herself smaller-carrying a grief she doesn't talk about and a past she has no intention of revisiting.

Michael Walks Again remembers the woman everyone else seems to have forgotten. They've been friends for years. Family, almost. But when Annie returns to the circle with a little boy at her side, old feelings surface, buried truths begin pressing their way into the open, and questions arise that no one is ready to answer.

Meanwhile, Kiowa veteran Robert Wilson arrives from Oklahoma believing urban Indians have lost something essential by living away from reservation communities. Instead, he encounters a thriving Native community built around powwow, family, and chosen kinship-and discovers that belonging may have less to do with where you live than with the people who make a place home.

Set within the contemporary urban Native powwow community, Round Dance is a novel about friendship and love, grief and silence, identity and belonging-and the realization that none of us can live life in the round in isolation.