All Books
Dakota Territory
First published some four decades ago. This political history of the Dakotas at their infancy offers readers a powerful picture of the politicians who carved a government out of a frontier and turned it into not one, but two huge states.
By Howard Lamar
ISBN 0-911042-47-4
Copyright 1997
Hardcover
336 pages
Dakota, Or What's a Heaven For
The lives and schemes of frontier politicians, Northern Pacific Railroad executives, bonanza farmers, and homesteaders converge in the story of Frances Houghton Bingham, who marries the son of a Red River Valley bonanza farmer in order to remain near her new husband’s sister. Emotionally complex, willful and resourceful, Frances is seduced by the myths of opportunity driving the settlement of Dakota Territory, and dares to dream of a new world in which to realize her unconventional desires. Providing a counterpoint to the dramatic risks taken by Frances is the generous voice of Kirsten Knudson, the daughter of Norwegian homesteaders. As Kirsten grows from a voluble girl to a formidable woman, her observations (equal parts absurdity and insight) reveal the heart of the novel.
Depression: MN in the 30s
The story of a people's struggle to hold on against the terrible economic adversity which struck in the 1930s. The book brings to life the economic chaos which confronted farmers, workers, businessmen, and bankers.
By: D.Jerome Tweton
Derby Girl: A Memoir
Roller derby is an odd place to strike a balance in life, but Sammi straps on her skates, adjusts her spandex, tests her center of gravity, and scores points with her no-punches-pulled memoir. Hardcover.
2018 Foreword INDIES Award Finalist in TWO categories: Autobiography/Memoir, LGBT Nonfiction; 2018 Gold Medalist in IPPY Awards for Cover Design, by Jamie Hohnadel Trosen
Destiny Manifested
"Expansive, full of grace and wit, meditation and mourning, Staiger's poetry accomplishes the difficult task of rendering a true portrait of her home, leaving in the grit alongside the sunflowers, the grime beside the larkspurs."--Amie Whittenmore, Glass Harvest
"A sense of place defines this book. Staiger reminds us that history is the lived experience of people in a distinct place...where weather matters and...the cycle of seasons mirrors the cycles of life."--Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
Bonnie Larson Staiger is the first recipient of our Voices of the Plains and Prairies Poetry Award.
Devotions
Timothy Murphy's poetry explores themes of faith, family, spirituality, death, friendship, and love, all rooted in place—the Red and Sheyenne River watersheds, North Dakota, and the Great Plains. Devotions, his newest collection, revives a major but neglected poetic genre with variety and amplitude. In 200+ short poems, he explores the vicissitudes of modern spiritual life, including his passions for hunting, Scouting, and people.
Seasoned
It seems that everyday life is dotted with moments that one wants to remember and share. When the circumstances and situations of my life provide me such moments, I try to make notes or a rough draft of a poem as soon as possible. Such events might be coffee with a friend, a walk around a park, a weekend camping trip, cleaning the house, a family celebration, or vacation travel. Sometimes I read, hear, overhear, or glimpse similar events of other people. In those cases, I imagine the cause or result of a situation of which I don’t have actual knowledge. After a period of informal meditation (usually days or weeks, but sometimes years) I revise the draft into a poem to share my experience, insight, discovery, or surprise. My lifelong goal as a writer is to have my readers, at least for a moment, perceive something as closely as possible to the way I perceived it. This collection of my recent work features the perceptions of a post-retirement guy paying attention to the current events of his life and times, and often commenting on his discoveries of how he and the world have changed through the seasons of the seventy-some years of his existence.
Available early December 2023
David R. Solheim, the North Dakota Statehood Centennial Poet, has published writing in more than two dozen periodicals and had work in several anthologies. He wrote two poetry chapbooks published by Dacotah Territory. His four previous books of poetry and a literary travelog related to Thoreau’s 1861 visit to Minnesota are available via buffalocommonspress.com. Solheim is an English Professor Emeritus of Dickinson State University, where he taught for almost 30 years, and, thanks to the late Larry Woiwode, an Emeritus Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota. He holds degrees in English and creative writing from Gustavus Adolphus College, Stanford University, and the University of Denver. Early in his career, he was a temporary faculty member at NDSU and conducted numerous programs for the North Dakota Humanities Council (now Humanities North Dakota) and the ND Council on the Arts. After residing in Minnesota for the last 10 years, he and his wife, Dr. Barbara Laman, also an Emeritus English Professor of DSU, have resettled near family members in the Portland, Oregon, area. Between them, Dave and Barbara have five adult children and seven grandchildren.
ISBN: 978-1-946163-52-3
Page Count: 78
Paperback
Publication Year: 2023
Downstairs Tenant, The
Jamie Parsley’s first book of short fiction contains 15 stories (and one play) of Dakota at mid-Twentieth Century, a time when morals, ideals and society in general were in flux. Capturing the “Prairie Gothic” genre, these stories are, at turns, tender and haunting, mystical and stoically unflinching, furtive and emotionally raw, violent and humorous. These characters in them struggle with overwhelming loss, tenuous faith, persistent doubt, nagging obsessions, haunted affection and, of course, an unpredictable natural world in which they ultimately find themselves exposed and vulnerable.
ISBN - 978-0-911042-80-1
Copyright 2014
Softcover
200 pages
Fargo, 1957: An Elegy
Poetry by Jamie Parsley with 60+ black & white photos. Paperback. 172pp In the early evening of Thursday, June 20, 1957, a tornado struck the city of Fargo, North Dakota. When it was done, ten people lay dead (three more would later die from their injuries), a city was devastated and countless lives would never be the same again. Among the dead were two relatives of Jamie Parsley, a poet and an Episcopal priest, who was born almost thirteen years after the storm. In this evocative and moving elegy of the storm and its victims, Parsley, an Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota, weaves a heartbreaking story of loss, poetry, pain, faith and, ultimately, renewal, and gives voice to those victims who, before now, were unable to speak for themselves. Fargo, 1957 is the story of the resilience and fortitude of the people who survived the storm, and those who did not.
Field Guide to Custer's Camps: On the March to the Little Bighorn
Dust off your bicycle, or muddy it up, however you prefer to hit the trail. Don Weinell, a long-distance bicyclist, biked the trail described in A Field Guide to Custer’s Camps: On the March to the Little Bighorn, keeping a log of his experiences and GPS locations, which inform this travel narrative. Weinell’s on-the-ground method of exploring history puts him in contact with the elements, the terrain, and the physical demands of cross-country travel. For readers not quite ready to don rain jackets, cold- and hot-weather wear, or snakebite kits, this field guide is the next best thing to following the trail in person.
Paperback/144pp/77 full color photos and maps
Five for the Land & Its People
The story of five pioneering agri-scientists who devoted their considerable energies and abilities to the North Dakota Agricultural College and Experiment Station. The author's portraits of each of the five men--Clare Bailey Waldron, Henry Luke Bolley, Edwin Fremont Ladd, John Henry Shepperd, and Lawrence Root Waldron--combine personal glimpses of the five with a narrative of their professional achievements and disappointments. By: Bill G. Reid.
Flowers between the Frosts: How to Grow Great Gardens in Short Seasons
Dorothy Collins produced about 2,800 gardening articles during a 55-year span as a journalist and editor working in the border cities of Fargo, ND and Moorhead, MN. She addressed the rewards and the challenges of gardening in a climate known for hot, dry summers and cold, windswept winters. This book features some of her best practical advice for gardeners challenged by the north country seasons, along with a few sprigs of Midwestern charm and whimsy.
ISBN -- 978-0-911042-76-4
Copyright 2012
From the Banat to North Dakota
From the Banat to North Dakota is the first collection of personal histories written by and about the North Dakota Banaters. The collection joins archival data about these pioneers with their individual stories; together they weave a poignant tale about ordinary people relying on their personal courage, community spirit and cultural heritage, to succeed in North Dakota.
By David Dreyer and Josette S. Hatter.
ISBN: 978-0-911042-66-5
Copyright: 2006
Softcover
230 pages
Gentle Warrior: Quentin Burdick
The Gentle Warrior is an insightful and warm biography of the late Senator Quentin Burdick of North Dakota.
Girl on a Float
Greetings from North Dakota
From the postcard collections of Lawrence Aasen and Ronald Olin; historical information written by John Bye and John Hallberg--An address book that features historic North Dakota postcards and short historical notes regarding the towns that they represent. Greetings from North Dakota was compiled by the professionals of the Institute from the postcard collections of Lawrence Aasen and Ronald Olin. They are uniquely North Dakota.
Half the Terrible Things
Half the Terrible Things is an intimate and sometimes violent novel portraying three interconnected lives. Based on true events, the life of Martin Tabert is short and tragic. Tabert is a young farm boy from Munich, North Dakota. While traveling around the country in 1922, he is pulled off a train near Tallahassee, Florida, charged with vagrancy, sentenced to a convict work camp, and whipped to death by the camp “Whipping Boss.” His body is buried in an unknown location in wild swamp country. Eighty years later, his girlfriend, Edna, nearing her end in a nursing home in Devils Lake, ND, asks her granddaughter, Nicole, to find his grave. Nicole, a young attorney with the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C., searches the Florida swamps while struggling with her own guilt stemming from her work at the Justice Department post 9/11. The Tabert case resulted in prison reform in Florida after North Dakotans intervened following Tabert’s death.
Harvest Widows
"Unflinching, attentive, both reverential and honest, the poems in Nick Bertelson's Harvest Widows address what it is to be midwestern."--James McKean, author of Headlong, Tree of Heaven, and We Are the Bus
Nick Bertelson is a fourth-generation farmer from southwestern Iowa. His poetry has appeared in Coe Review, Valley Voices, Prairie Fire, and North American Review, as a James Hearst Poetry Prize finalist.
Harvest Widows is the second chapbook to be published as NDSU Press’s annual Poetry of the Plains and Prairies Award, and the fourth chapbook to be produced by publishing students on turn-of-the-twentieth-century hand-letterpress equipment.
Hiking All Night
At a relentless pace, Timothy Iver Murphy (1951–2018) produced an incredible amount of poetry in the last years of his life. A sample of his brilliant work is included in this posthumously published collection.
Hiking All Night is an account of the simple pleasures of Murphy’s life: hunting, companionship of faithful dogs, farming, and hiking — a lifelong habit carried over from his training as an Eagle Scout and member of the Order of the Arrow. Murphy extends his reach beyond his native region of the northern plains, across the United States and as far as the Himalayan Mountains. Throughout Hiking All Night, familiar inspirations appear, including homage to the masters of literature who have formed his craft and the religious beliefs that anchored his life. Most poignantly, Murphy includes relationships with friends and family, the physical and emotional struggles of this mortal world, and reflections upon regrets and restoration.
hardcover/373 pages/3 color inserts
Preface by former Colorado Poet Laureate David Mason
Hiking All Night is Timothy Murphy's penultimate collection of poetry. Forthcoming in summer 2021, NDSU Press will publish Last Poems, written by Murphy during the final months of his life.
His Feathers Were Chains
Lajimodiere’s newest collection of poetry takes its title from a statue the author observed--an Indian on a horse--fashioned from welded-together farm implements. The premise of the collection is overt criticism of settler society, but the poetry is subtle, approachable, and grounded in Ojibwe knowledge and customs. Feathers is divided into five sections: Broken Glass Dreams, Identity, His Feathers Were Chains, Thin White Heat, and Dancing with a Whirlwind.