Creative Work
Published Books
Creative Overview
My personal motto is “Imagine Otherwise,” and this is the perspective that shapes and informs all my writing, especially my creative work.
How might the world look different if we didn’t start with the corrosive and simplistic binary of “savagism vs. civilization”? What would fantasy fiction look like with Indigenous people, people of colour, queer folks, women and nonbinary folx, and other frequently stereotyped or marginalized communities at the centre rather than the margins? Must our imagined worlds always look to Europe and its patriarchal, colonial legacies, or can we root them in the deep cultures, lineages, genders, and histories of these lands? These questions drive my work, and I hope this helps open space for others to imagine with greater diversity, complexity, and possibility.
Books
The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles
UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS (2011)
Taking fantasy literature beyond the stereotypes, Daniel Heath Justice’s acclaimed Thorn and Thunder novels are set in a world resembling eighteenth-century North America. The original trilogy is available here for the first time as a fully revised one-volume novel. The story of the struggle for the green world of the Everland, home of the forest-dwelling Kyn, is an adventure tale that bends genre and gender.
Dreyd: The Way of Thorn and Thunder
KEGEDONCE PRESS (2007)
The forces of Eromar ravage the Everland, and the skies are filled with the smoke and ashes of the burning woods. Those Folk who do not escape into the far mountains and hidden valleys are driven into the broken westlands of Humanity, where Dreydmaster Vald reveals the full vision of his mad crusade, one that will annihilate even the memory of the Kyn and their kind.
Wyrwood: The Way of Thorn and Thunder
KEGEDONCE PRESS (2006)
The Sevenfold Council stands firm against Dreydmaster Vald’s treaty terms - they will not surrender the Everland. Their will is strong, but there is a traitor in their midst, and Vald intends to win this struggle… by any means necessary. As the Everland is torn apart by invasion and the threat of civil war, the young warrior-Wielder, Tarsa’deshae, and the little Tetawa Leafspeaker, Tobhi Burrows, travel to Eromar City, the centre of Vald’s influence, in hopes of rescuing the diplomats who have long languished in the shadows of Gorthac Hall.
Kynship: The Way of Thorn and Thunder
KEGEDONCE PRESS (2005)
The Everland, home of the Eld-Folk since time immemorial, a deep green world of ancient mystery and sacred shadow. A thousand years have passed since the world of Men and the world of the Folk collided in catastrophe. The wyr-powers of the Kyn and the other Folk have preserved their verdant homeland from the ravenous greed of Humanity since the Melding, but those powers are now under siege.
Short Stories
High Fashion and the Necromantic Arts
The story of a malevolent wizard with bad fashion taste and the style-conscious sorceress who bests him. The first appearance in print of Denarra Syrene, my inner drag queen who becomes a key player in The Way of Thorn and Thunder. This story was published in Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks, edited by Emily Pohl-Weary (Sumach Press, 2004).
Ander’s Awakening
Denarra Syrene wasn’t always the fierce and fabulous sorceress she would one day become. Long before she was Denarra, she was Ander, an unloved boy who longed for love and beauty in his life. This story first appeared in W’daub Awae/Speaking True: A Kegedonce Anthology, edited by Warren Cariou (Kegedonce Press, 2010).
The Boys Who Became the Hummingbirds
Very loosely based on the Cherokee story about the origins of tobacco, but focusing on a rather different sort of medicine, this short story is about the transformative power of courageous love and acceptance—not just for the individual, but for our communities as well. It was published in 2016 in the Love Beyond Body, Space & Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology (Bedside Press, edited by Hope Nicholson); a graphic version of the story, illustrated by Weshoyot Alvitre, was published in Moonshot, Volume 2: The Indigenous Comics Collection, from AH Comics in 2017. It received the 2018 Prism Award (Small to Midsize Press category) from Prism Comics and the Cartoon Arts Museum at ComicCon 2018.
The Keeper of the Bones
Set in the world of The Way of Thorn and Thunder on the edge of the Expulsion, Dweggo is an aged Tetawa Bonekeeper, the caretaker of the dead in his Everland village. But after a brutal attack on his town, he is brought to a city of Humans far from home to become an object of study and a strange spectacle on public display. But Dweggo’s intimacy with death has given him surviving ways to survive, especially when a Tetawa child offers him a chance at revenge. First published in 2016, it was reprinted in Zegaabam: Indigenous Horror Stories, edited by Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (Kegedonce Press), in 2024.
Tatterborn
A queer Indigenous reimagining of the origins of the Scarecrow of Oz—with a decidedly dark twist—this tale debuted in 2017 in Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, edited by Sophie McCall, Deanna Reder, David Gaertner, and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill).