Author
“Chelsea Hicks’ deadpan dexterous wit can make you laugh and cry in the space of a heartbeat. A Calm and Normal Heart is the book I’ve been waiting for—audacious, tender, and fiercely committed.”
—Louise Erdrich
A Calm & Normal Heart is Chelsea T. Hicks’ first book, released June 21, 2022 (Unnamed Press).
Chelsea T. Hicks’ writing has been published in the LA Review of Books, Paris Review, McSweeney’s, the Believer, The Audacity, Yellow Medicine Review, Indian Country Today and elsewhere.
Advance praise for A Calm & Normal Heart
These stories will break your heart and make you want to dance. Chelsea T. Hicks delivers a striking debut.
—Toni Jensen
A Calm & Normal Heart is sharp, sexy, and endlessly surprising. An electric blend of playfulness and intensity in Hicks' prose ignites her characters' desires. Their stories dazzle and are to be savored. This is a gorgeous collection!
—Deesha Philyaw
Chelsea T. Hicks’s warm, sharp, and searching debut is both a contemporary feat of decolonial poetics (which hopefully will inspire more and more works written in and translated from indigenous languages) and a closely observed, often wryly comic collection of short stories that feels as alively in-the-process-becoming as its singular characters: in Hicks’s deft words, its “everyday heartbroken players of life.”
—Elaine Castillo
… a marvel of storytelling and unlike anything I've read before. At the intersection of tradition and technology, past and present, these vivid and absorbing Native characters fill the pages of this extraordinary debut with tenderness and humor.
—Kali Fajardo-Anstine
A genuine page-turner full of sentences so beautiful they demand re-reading.
—Brandon Hobson
… a fresh and wholly original collection from a shining new star in the firmament of contemporary literature.
—Carla Crujido
Unabashedly contemporary, A Calm & Normal Heart documents and channels messy, sexy, people dealing and not dealing with the complex reverberations of our American past in a relentless now. Hicks never shies from the restlessness of racial, sexual, and cultural identity; she embraces her characters’ fragility and obstinacy with an unbound language that is as savvy as it is openhearted.
—Lucy Corin
A Calm and Normal Heart: Stories
Chelsea T. Hicks
From Oklahoma to California, the heroes of A Calm & Normal Heart are modern-day homesteaders, adventurers, investigators—seeking out new places to call their own inside a Nation to which they do not entirely belong. A member of the Osage tribe, author Chelsea T. Hicks’ stories are compelled by an overlooked diaspora inside America: that of young Native people.
In stories like “Goodbye Pizza in Los Angeles,” “The Oklahoma Ocean,” and “Moot Point,” iPhone lifestyles co-mingle with ancestral connection, strengthening relationships or pushing people apart, while generational trauma haunts individual paths. Broken partnerships and polyamorous desire signal a fraught era of modern love, even as old ways continue to influence how people assess compatibility. And in “THNXX by Alcatraz,” an indigenous student finds themselves alone on campus for Thanksgiving break, confronting racial differences and the true meaning of the national holiday.
Other stories focus on women responding to and transcending familial abuse and patriarchal conditioning. Leaping back in time, “A Fresh Start Ruined” inhabits the life of Florence, an Osage woman attempting to hide her origins while social climbing in midcentury Oklahoma. And in “House of RGB” a woman settles in a home of her own, finally detaching from her pattern of seeking safety through men with the help of a series of ancestral visitations.
Whether in between college semesters or jobs, on the road to tribal dances or hasty weddings, escaping troubled homes, or choosing a new relationship, the characters of A Calm & Normal Heart occupy a complicated and often unreliable terrain. Chelsea T. Hicks brings wry humor, sprawling imagination, and a profound connection to Native experience in a collection that will subvert long-held assumptions for many readers, and inspire hope along the way.