All Books

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

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.

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

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

"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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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

The Gentle Warrior is an insightful and warm biography of the late Senator Quentin Burdick of 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.

Charles “Catch” Sherman has lived at the corner of Fourth and Lafayette—in the house his grandfather built—his entire life. While content in the river town of Beaumont, Iowa, he knows life will be different for his eldest daughter, Edie, a gifted physics student. Set in the late 1950s through the 1970s, Catch and Release is a story about holding on, letting go, and the leaps we must take to become the people we are meant to be.

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. 

Dakota Dreaming returns us to the ancient core of poetry a spiritual quest. But this book offers no standard hero's journey--no daring descent int the underworld, no triumphant, hopeful return. It offers, rather, a gathering of visions received by one who has learned to dwell indefinitely in the liminal space between realms. While much of the collection in written in the Japanese haibun form, Buettner's imagery is rooted deep in North American prairie soil. Her poems are like "abandoned houses that let the gold of afternoon light filter in through open windows," offering some brief, imperfect respite for "those of us who have lost our way." And when the daylight fades and darkness becomes complete, Buettner guides us: "I borrow the light / of snow."

--Brendan Stermer, author of Forgotten Frequencies (NDSU Press, 2023)

"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.