StoryFest, The Westport Library’s annual literary festival, is kicking off its eighth year by celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day with an exclusive book launch for We Survived the Night, the highly anticipated debut memoir by author and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat — one day in advance of the book’s official nationwide release.
NoiseCat will be joined by Ramin Ganeshram, executive director of the Westport Museum for History and Culture, for a keynote conversation in the Library’s Trefz Forum on Monday, October 13, at 7 pm.
Tickets are $30 and include a copy of We Survived the Night. It is the same price for one seat and a copy of the book or two seats and a book. Books will also be available for purchase at the event and a signing will follow the talk.
As the largest annual literary festival in Connecticut and one of the biggest in the Northeast, StoryFest draws scores of authors and hundreds of readers, writers, and fans each year. With an interdisciplinary career that defies creative boundaries, NoiseCat’s work aligns with StoryFest at its core — a celebration of storytelling in all its forms across all types of media.
NoiseCat’s journalism has appeared in dozens of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker, and has been recognized with many awards including the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize. In 2021, NoiseCat was named to the TIME100 Next list of emerging leaders.
He also is a critically acclaimed filmmaker who was nominated for an Academy Award for Sugarcane, directed alongside Emily Kassie, which follows an investigation into abuse and missing children at the Indian residential school NoiseCat’s family was sent to near Williams Lake, British Columbia.
Sugarcane premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where NoiseCat and Kassie won the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition. Additionally, the film has been recognized with dozens of awards, including Best Documentary from the National Board of Review and, of course, the Oscar nod.
We Survived the Night is a stunning narrative that interweaves oral history with hard-hitting journalism and a deeply personal father-son journey into a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence. Told in the style of a “Coyote Story,” a legend about the trickster forefather of NoiseCat’s people who was revered for his wit and mocked for his tendency to self-destruct, We Survived the Night brings a traditional art form nearly annihilated by colonization back to life on the page. Through a dazzling blend of history and mythology, memoir and reportage, NoiseCat unravels old stories and braids together new ones.
Penguin Random House, NoiseCat’s publisher, describes him as “one of the most powerful young writers at work today.” And his debut has been praised as “invigorating and soul-stirring” (Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief) and “a powerful archive of Indigenous pain and resistance” (Publishers Weekly).
“This is a love letter to Oakland, to the Canim Lake Band Tsq’secen of the Secwepemc Nation, to a father from his son, to the act of being a Native person in the 21st century finding ways to love even through all that wounds have opened and wrought,” said Tommy Orange, New York Times best-selling author of Wandering Stars. “With this, Julian Brave NoiseCat has written a book I’ve been waiting my whole life to read.”
Before turning full-time to writing and filmmaking, NoiseCat was a political strategist, policy analyst, and cultural organizer. In 2019, he helped lead a grassroots effort to bring an Indigenous canoe journey to San Francisco Bay to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Alcatraz Occupation. Eighteen canoes representing communities from as far north as Canada and as far west as Hawaii participated in the journey, which was covered by dozens of local and national media outlets, including The New York Times.
In addition, NoiseCat is a champion powwow dancer and student of Salish art and history. His expansive repertoire pays homage to his cultural roots as a proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen and a descendant of the Lil'Wat Nation of Mount Currie.
Ganeshram has served as the executive director of the Westport Museum since 2018. In recognition for her work as curator of the Museum’s 2018-19 exhibit, Remembered: The History of African Americans in Westport, Ganeshram received the prestigious award for Leadership in the Museum Field from the New England Museum Association. In 2019, Ganeshram was also awarded the Paul Cuffee Memorial Fellowship for the For the Study of Minorities in American Maritime History. And in 2022, she was named a fellow at the Fred W. Smith Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon.
Under Ganeshram’s leadership, the Museum has partnered closely with organizations focused on BIPOC cultural movements. With her at its helm, the Museum has been recognized by museum-industry leaders and by Connecticut Humanities as a standard-bearer for how small to midrange museums can truthfully and faithfully address American history around race and identity — particularly relating to slavery and civil rights.
StoryFest 2025 runs October 13 to October 20, starting with NoiseCat’s book launch and ending with a 10th anniversary celebration of Shonda Rhimes’ New York Times best-selling memoir, Year of Yes.
The festival rings in its hallmark weekend on Friday, October 17, by showcasing storytelling through film and music with a screening of the documentary Bonnie Blue: James Cotton’s Life in the Blues, followed by a concert event with James Montgomery’s Blues Band featuring SNL Beehive Queen Christine Ohlman.
Saturday, October 18, will feature a series of events starting at 10 am and going until 6 pm — including panel discussions, author talks, book readings, signings, and more.
