Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones (born January 22, 1972) is a Blackfeet Native American author of experimental fiction, horror fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction.

His works include the horror novels The Only Good Indians, My Heart is a Chainsaw, and Night of the Mannequins.

Stephen Graham Jones was born in Midland, Texas, on January 22, 1972, to Dennis Jones and Rebecca Graham.

He is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana.

Jones received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy from Texas Tech University in 1994, a Master of Arts degree in English from the University of North Texas in 1996, and his Ph.D. in 1998 from Florida State University.

While he was attending Florida State University, Jones's dissertation director introduced him to Houghton-Mifflin editor Jane Silver at the Writers' Harvest conference.

Jones pitched her a novel which he had not yet written, and Silver liked the idea.

Jones then wrote the book, The Fast Red Road, as his dissertation.

Jones and his wife Nancy married on May 20, 1995.

They have one child together.

It was published as his debut novel in 2000.

In 2002, Jones won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction.

It was followed by All the Beautiful Sinners in 2003.

In 2006, he won the Jesse Jones Award for Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters for his 2005 short story collection Bleed Into Me.

Jones is the Ineva Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado, where he has been a faculty member since 2008.

He won the Bram Stoker Award for Long Fiction for Mapping the Interior in 2017.

The Only Good Indians, a horror novel, was published on July 14, 2020, through Saga Press and Titan Books.

It won the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction in 2020. Jones won two 2020 Bram Stoker Awards for Night of the Mannequins and The Only Good Indians.

Jones contributed an X-Men story to Marvel Comics' Marvel's Voices: Indigenous Voices #1 anthology, release in November 2020.

Joining him was artist David Cutler.

Jones has acknowledged a debt to Native American Renaissance writers, especially Gerald Vizenor.

Scholar Cathy Covell Waegner describes Jones's work as containing elements of "dark playfulness, narrative inventiveness, and genre mixture."

Joseph Gaudet cited Jones' writing as "post-ironic" or representative of David Foster Wallace's "New Sincerity," a literary approach "emerging in response to the cynicism, detachment, and alienation that many saw as defining the postmodern canon," seeking instead "to more patently embrace morality, sincerity, and an 'ethos of belief.' His eighth novel, Ledfeather, which Jones stated was the most widely taught of his books, is used as Gaudet's primary example.