Ari Tison is a Bribri Indigenous Costa Rican American poet, novelist, editor, and educator. Her fiction joins poetry and prose to examine brotherhood, violence, trauma, art, healing, and Indigenous continuity, beginning with the award-winning young-adult novel Saints of the Household.
Winner of the Pura Belpré Award and Walter Dean Myers Award for Young Adult Literature! Saints of the Household is a haunting contemporary YA about an act of violence in a small-town--beautifully told by a debut Indigenous Costa Rican-American writer--that will take your breath away. Max and Jay have always depended on one another for their survival. Growing up with a physically abusive father, the two Bribri American brothers have learned that the only way to protect themselves and their mother is to stick to a schedule and keep their heads down. But when they hear a classmate in trouble in the woods, instinct takes over and they intervene, breaking up a fight and beating their high school's star soccer player to a pulp. This act of violence threatens the brothers' dreams for the future and their beliefs about who they are. As the true details of that fateful afternoon unfold over the course of the novel, Max and Jay grapple with the weight of their actions, their shifting relationship as brothers, and the realization that they may be more like their father than they thought. They'll have to reach back to their Bribri roots to find their way forward. Told in alternating points of view using vignettes and poems, debut author Ari Tison crafts an emotional, slow-burning drama about brotherhood, abuse, recovery, and doing the right thing.
Print · 2023 · English
More About Ari Tison
Ari Tison is a Bribri Indigenous Costa Rican American poet and author from Minnesota. She earned an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University and now teaches in that program. Her work spans novels, poetry, essays, anthology editing, and writing for younger readers.
Her debut novel, Saints of the Household, alternates prose vignettes and poems between two Bribri brothers living with violence and its aftermath. Tison has connected the form to visual art, the different emotional lives of the brothers, Indigenous story structures, and autoethnography. She describes the book's architecture as a mirror that balances the brothers through the final page.
Tison's broader catalog includes the Indigenous Costa Rica-set mystery Together We See, the co-edited poetry anthology Witness, and the forthcoming picture book When I Was a Little Girl. In podcast and interview conversations, she links poetry and story to emotional survival, ancestral heritage, justice, and the protected imaginative space books can offer young readers.
