In Coyote and the Thunderbird, award-winning poet and storyteller James P. Lenfestey reimagines one of North America’s oldest and most elusive figures for the modern world: Coyote—comic healer, holy troublemaker, restless wanderer, lover, hustler, father, and fool.

These wildly inventive tales send Coyote across highways, powwows, cities, weddings, beaches, ballparks, and backroads in a mythic red Thunderbird, where every detour becomes a new adventure and every joke carries a flash of wisdom. Along the way he falls in love, loses and finds family, tangles with desire, weather, modern life, and his own legendary appetite for trouble.

Rooted in the rich tradition of Indigenous Trickster stories yet unmistakably contemporary in voice and setting, Coyote and the Thunderbird blends mythology, literary fiction, humor, satire, and spiritual play into a book that is both timeless and new. Lenfestey’s Coyote is hilarious, unruly, tender, reckless, and deeply alive—a shape-shifting presence moving through the American landscape with mischief, heartbreak, and wild insight.

With a foreword by Lewis Hyde, author of Trickster Makes This World, this collection will appeal to readers of contemporary mythology, Native and Indigenous-inspired literature, folklore, literary short fiction, and comic philosophical storytelling.

Funny, wise, and gloriously unpredictable, Coyote is back on the road.