Rebecca Roanhorse Books in Order

Rebecca Roanhorse was born in Conway, Arkansas, and grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. She has said that science fiction and fantasy were an early escape, even when those books rarely reflected the lives and histories she knew.

Stories came before publication did.

She studied religious studies at Yale, earned a master's degree in theology from Union Theological Seminary, and later received a law degree from the University of New Mexico. Before her fiction career took off, she worked as a computer programmer and then as a lawyer. That mix of training shows up in her books. She is drawn to belief, power, law, identity, and the ways institutions shape ordinary people.

Her breakthrough was quick. Her short story Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ won both the Nebula and Hugo awards, and soon after she released Trail of Lightning, her debut novel. That book follows Diné monster hunter Maggie Hoskie through a flooded future Southwest, and it announced many of the things Roanhorse would keep doing well: fast plots, sharp dialogue, damaged characters, and worlds that feel lived in from page one.

She likes stories that put people under pressure.

The Sixth World books, including Trail of Lightning, Storm of Locusts, and later the novella River of Bones, blend post-apocalyptic survival with monsters, medicine, old stories, and messy human loyalty. Readers who come to those books for action usually stay for Maggie and Kai, whose partnership is full of friction, trust, humor, and hurt. Roanhorse is good at making a supernatural threat feel big without losing sight of the people caught in its path.

She can also shift scale without losing momentum. The Between Earth and Sky trilogy, beginning with Black Sun and continuing through Fevered Star and Mirrored Heavens, moves into epic fantasy. Those books draw on the cultures and histories of the pre-Columbian Americas and center sea voyages, prophecy, clan politics, and gods who are far too close for comfort. They are bigger books, but still built around personal choices and the cost of power.

Then there is Race to the Sun, a middle grade adventure that brings Diné stories to younger readers through a funny, scary, warmhearted rescue quest. And there is Tread of Angels, a dark fantasy novella set in an 1883 mining town where theology, class, and family all get tangled together. She has also written franchise work such as Resistance Reborn in Star Wars and Phoenix Song: Echo for Marvel, which says a lot about how flexible she is across settings.

Across all of that work, some patterns keep resurfacing. She writes about communities under strain, people carrying grief, and characters trying to decide whether they belong to a family, a city, a tradition, or none of the above. Gods show up. Monsters do too. But the deeper question is usually about responsibility, survival, and who gets to tell the story of a place.

She now lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and dog, and, by her own account, drinks a lot of black coffee. Alongside her fiction, she has written for television, including Echo and A Murder at the End of the World. The through line is easy to spot. However strange the setting gets, Rebecca Roanhorse keeps returning to people trying to make a life inside systems that were never built to hold them.