All Books

Although Home River is a work of fiction, readers should not underestimate the great amount of historicity therein. Rodney Nelson has captured in carefully honed language the distinctive lilt of Norwegian-American dialect and the political and social atmosphere of the Red River Valley of the North in the middle 1940s. By imagining one small episode from that era, he achieves an authenticity of voice and color which might not have been possible in a strict recounting or memoir. Rodney Nelson has studied the valley for most of his life; his novels, stories and books of poems reflect his clear-eyed, unsentimental love for this rich land and difficult climate, and for the equally complex people who chose to settle the area, his grandparents among them. Home River is first of all a work of fiction whose intent is simply to please-but one of the many other things the book does is to help us preserve our knowledge of the immigrant pioneering spirit as manifested in the settlers of the Red River Valley and their children.

In Hunter’s Log: Volumes II & III, you’ll find Tim’s love for all the rites and tribulations of rising at O Dark Thirty, God O'clock to take his dogs out for training or hunting and for days that conclude with a pheasant gumbo steaming on the stove.

“Murphy is not just our best hunting poet . . . he is also our bard of all things North, with the blood of the Irish and Vikings in his veins. . . . No one can write better about the chill that always lurks in the northern breeze even on summer evenings, or the knowledge of mortality seasoned in the present even in the best of days. These volumes are full of the rueful mortal comedy of a man who has seen friends and dogs die and knows he is not immune.” Timothy Murphy’s “hunting, as it should, has given him the eye of a painter and a botanist’s knowledge welded seamlessly together by the ear of a poet.” —Stephen Bodio, book editor for
Gray’s Sporting Journal, author of eleven books, including A Rage for Falcons: An Alliance between Man and Bird

“Murphy, a poet, was perhaps the best known literary figure living in North Dakota.”
—Mike Jacobs, former editor and publisher of Grand Forks Herald

Only 17 women have been elected to statewide office in North Dakota in 125 years! Read their stories in this book. Laura Eisenhuth, elected Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1893 (and the first woman in the United States to be elected to statewide office); Agriculture Commissioner Sarah Vogel, first woman to serve on the powerful North Dakota Industrial Commission and who teamed up with Willie Nelson to provide help to farmers; Superintendent of Public Instruction Minnie Nielson who was not allowed into her office for a week after her inauguration; Senator Heidi Heitkamp, who raised her family while serving as tax commissioner and attorney general,all the time working on important issues for North Dakotans. Susan Wefald has pulled the stories of these fabulous women together into this one volume. IMPORTANT VOICES shares their triumphs and losses, their hopes and challenges. It shares what these North Dakota women have accomplished and the challenges still facing women who want to be elected to statewide office today. It is a "must read" for anyone who enjoys North Dakota history, real life politics, or learning how women for over one hundred years have served our state.

ISBN - 978-0-911042-79-5
Copyright 2014
358 pages
Softcover

In a rich yet often austere setting of the Great Plains, Bonnie Larson Staiger's second poetry collection--In Plains Sight--brings those realities into full view through the lens of the prairie ethos. In moments when the natural world confounds the objective and logical world, she brings us into an encounter with a coyote, a sub-zero walk after a blizzard, or a humorous swipe at a fast-food restaurant. Paperback with French flaps.

Contemporary poetry from the farms and ranches of the Dakotas. Striking insights into 21st Century rural life.

By: Bruce Roseland.

Last Poems, by Timothy Murphy

As described by the collection editor, poet and translator Catherine Chandler, Last Poems is a veritable journal intime, albeit one that Timothy Murphy wished to share with his readers. In his unmistakable voice, and often in stark language almost too painful to read, Tim chronicles his physical, spiritual, and emotional life during his final months, beginning on the day of his cancer diagnosis in early January 2018, through his various treatments, and ultimately his decision to withdraw from clinical trials. . . . Let [Last Poems] be my Last Will and Testament, Murphy writes in "Envoi." And so it is. Last Poems bears witness—with grace, grit, and gratitude—to the life and loves of this major North American poet. Hardcover.

A story of pioneer optimism, abiding faith and people who longed for the kind of community they had left behind in Europe. At the turn of the century, Benedictine missionaries and homesteading immigrants still living in earthen dwellings collaborated to build awe-inspiring churches of stone and stained glass. Churches at Mandan, Devils Lake, Richardton, and Strasburg, ND and Hoven, SD are presented in detail. More than one hundred color photographs capture the magnificence of these five churches.

By: J. Coomber and Sheldon Green.

The Mammals of North Dakota, Second Edition, documents eighty-eight mammal species with full-color photos, text, and maps. Identification includes common, scientific, and known Native American names. This new edition of The Mammals of North Dakota features an increased number of recorded species since the First Edition, as well as significant shifts in distribution across the state—such as moves made by the opossum and the spotted skunk.

Chapters include information on species descriptions, habitat, ecology and behavior, reproduction, status, conservation, and taxonomic keys for species identification. Introductory chapters define the mammalian biogeography of the state, the mammalian paleofauna of North Dakota (by John Hoganson), and the principal habitats of North Dakota (by Bill Jensen).

A Moment with Strangers embraces the brief encounter, sometimes with other people, sometimes with landscape, weather, or history. Cost is $19.95.

A young girl dreams of becoming a circus performer and riding pink elephants in a sequined gown. A young boy hopes to use magic, a divining rod, to find his grandfather's trunk of gold buried on their land, so family stories say. But their exotic dreams eventually turn into the simpler life of farmers, though their simple life is never simple.

Their many stories are told in poems with achingly powerful expressive language in Carolyn Dahl's chapbook, A Muddy Kind of Love. Hand-letterpress printed, A Muddy Kind of Love is the 2020 Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award winner.

Dr. Robert Groves combines thorough research with personal insights for an engaging record of the rise of music as a field of study at NDSU. From its beginnings with mid-1890s campus music clubs, to the formation in 1903 of an official Department of Music, up to the designation of the School of Music in 2012 and beyond, Groves brings the history of the Challey School of Music to life. Featuring more than 200 photos capturing the past century of student musicians and faculty, Music at NDSU is filled with historical high notes sure to resonate with readers. Paperback.

2018 Midwest Book Awards finalist for Arts/Photography/Coffee Table Books

This book seeks to develop a deeper understanding of how the geologic setting of eastern North Dakota changed through time, how vegetative communities and associated wildlife responded, and how processes such as climate and fire fluctuated. The authors provide glimpses of natural communities of eastern North Dakota, beginning with the Precambrian Era, about 3.5 million years ago. They explore, in greater detail, how grasslands, herbivores, varying weather patterns, fire and indigenous people have interacted during the last 10,000 years, with most emphasis placed on the last 300 years.

By: Kieth Severson and Carolyn Hull Sieg

Fans of Debra Marquart’s landmark memoir, The Horizontal World, will rejoice over the publication of The Night We Landed on the Moon—shapeshifting essays that travel from the blizzardy Midwest to sweltering Siberia, from a flooding Michigan basement to the panic-inducing Paris Catacombs, from her life as a rebellious farmer’s daughter to hard rock musician to professor and poet laureate. Every page is full of story and insight, laced with wit, as Marquart meditates on the hungers of home and wanderlust, the way her Germans-from-Russia family is "preserved in their hyphenations," the poetic strangeness of basketball, the insidiousness of fracking boomtowns, and the ironies of a nostalgia called heimat. The individual essays are astonishing, the collection as a whole profound.” —K. L. Cook, author of Marrying Kind and The Art of Disobedience

The scope of the poets in this collection is as broad as the landscape itself, including work by Heid E. Erdrich, Mark Vinz, Debra Marquart, Ed Bok Lee, and North Dakota’s Poet Laureate,Larry Woiwode.

Some are poets descended from indigenous inhabitants of the High Plains. Others are descendants of those who immigrated here,from Germany, Russia, or the Scandinavian countries in the nineteenth century, or more recently from other parts of the country and world. They write about the historical struggles of settlement and assimilation, and more contemporary versions of those struggles in the Bakken oil patch in the western part of the state. Some write about North Dakota from the rural settings they have known and loved for a lifetime, others from the distant vantages of nostalgia or escape, and still others from the point of view of transplants coming to terms with their new home. The poets here include seasoned and emerging voices, women and men, old and young, those from the ranching and oil-flared badlands west of the Missouri, and from the flood-prone river valley farmlands of the east.

The poems in this book ache for home. They ache to be at home. In reflecting those who ache in this great expanse, these poems are about what connects us together as humans, poems that sing to each other across lines and pages and space, demonstrating that, as poet Thomas McGrath asserts in his Letter to an Imaginary Friend,North Dakota is everywhere.

Edited by Heidi Czerwiec
Copyright 2015
180 pages
Softcover

Featuring stunning black-and-white landscapes taken between 1998 and 2002, North Dakota: Prairie Landscape is a testament to photographer Leo Kim's deep appreciation for the nature and people of North Dakota.

Leo Kim grew up in Shanghai, Macao, and Hong Kong and later lived in Austria and Minneapolis. His photographs are featured in numerous private and public collections including Microsoft Business Solutions and the North Dakota Museum of Art.

North Dakota's Geologic Legacy is the story of the landscape-why it looks like it does and how it formed. The book is designed for physical and arm-chair travelers. Most of the features portrayed can be seen from the road. The shape of the land, the geologic materials, the processes that shaped them, the length of time involved in their formation-all of these comprise a fascinating puzzle.

By John P. Bluemle.
Bronze Medalist in 2018 IPPY Awards for Science; 2016 finalist in Midwest Book Awards for Nature

“Readers of Operation Snowbound will find themselves immersed in blinding snow, innovative rescues, and daring aerial operations during the blizzards of 1949. Mills gives readers a 1st-hand look at how cooperation from pilots, farmers, and scientists in the Great Plains & the American West were instrumental in formalizing the federal emergency response system that continues to help Americans face environmental hazards today.”--David D. Vail, U. of Neb. at Kearney.

David Danbom's Our Purpose is to Serve is a probing, insightful and lively history of the first hundred years of the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station.

Pacing Dakota is a collection of essays reflecting on the history and culture of the Great Plains of North America. University Distinguished Professor Thomas D. Isern, with more than forty years as a working historian and regional author, transitions from the close confines of historical archives into the prairie landscapes of the northern plains. Pacing Dakota speaks with the mingled voices of scholarly historian, outdoor sportsman, culinary enthusiast, lifelong Lutheran, and prairie farmboy. The author prowls prairie churches, finds forgotten artifacts, and gathers cherished stories from Williston to Wahpeton and points beyond. He situates his encounters along the way into the canon of literary and historical writing on the prairies. In the end, he speaks for a generation committed to making a good life in this place. 264 pp. 17 photos. Hardcover.