New Titles

In a small North Dakota town, Sheriff Ray Adams faces the dangers of a changing world where bigotry and violence are fueled by social media. As he confronts these challenges, he reflects upon his own life, the life of his ex-wife--a former Miss Rodeo North Dakota--and the prejudices faced by their daughter growing up in a small town on the prairie. The peace is about to be shattered, and there will be blood. The Last Dakota Cowboy is a deeply moving story about love, loss, and betrayal in uncertain times. 

"Paul Legler's The Last Dakota Cowboy centers on a rough-and-tumble sheriff dealing with a broken marriage based on a near fatal attraction. At the same time, the oil boom brings big changes and shady characters to his small Dakota town. Heartfelt, full of the hard history of this country, and action packed, it's a natural for the legion of fans of Yellowstone and Madison and the Longmire series."
--Pete Fromm, five-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Literary Award. 

ISBN: 978-1-946163-84-4

Page Count: 148

Picture Count: NA

Paperback

Publication Year: 2026

Aurora is a shimmering witness to Thom Tammaro’s bond with a place that he has come to know and obviously love. His stories about that day along the Red River, dry pods of milkweed, harvest time, hunters, closing the cabin, waiting for the first snowfall, and the demise of the buffalo are evidence of how much he has become a part of the Dakotas’ open horizon. The poems are beautiful and follow seasonal changes tending toward the autumnal and wintery, appropriate for a poet writing out of the Red River Valley. We see real night hawks “above the roof of the old science building at the university.” We see buffalo on the hills and meadows “sway like tall black grass,” and when we’re finished with considering the “voices of escape or return,” we can love the “pods of milkweed/ Red pine, blazing stars/ The purple clusters of September.” Besides this beautiful book (there have been three previous collections and two chapbooks), it’s time to celebrate Tammaro’s contribution to the literary life of the area. He has edited and curated many anthologies of thematic tributes, as well as a collection of Minnesota women poets from territorial days to the present. Working on that anthology with Thom and Connie Wanek was one of the delights of my literary career. Thom is a gem, a guiding star, and a guy who will spend hours to get your car started in a polar vortex snow storm. The same creative energy that made this beautiful book of poems floods Thom’s work in other areas, especially those that contribute to the literary world of the upper Midwest, bright as any aurora.

—Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota Poet Laureate 2011–2021

“Tough but Fair originated from my twenty-eight years of experience working with troubled juveniles and convicted felons. On December 1, 1972, I was appointed Deputy Warden of the North Dakota State Penitentiary. The prison was on the verge of being out of control daily…inadequately funded and staffed by untrained, aging correctional officers; uneducated managerial staff; and one qualified social worker. The combination of these factors led to assaults on staff, improper discipline, a rapid decline in the facility structure, and extreme disrepair of the utilities and services. A new warden was appointed, and he began to organize a plan to regain control of the inmate population, institute programs that would divert the inmates away from criminal behavior within the prison, and build respect for the staff. These challenges led me on a journey that was intellectually, physically, and spiritually transformative. It was the greatest challenge of my life.” - Winston E. Satran

Anticipated ship date is late January 2026.

Rethinking Rural: Reflections on Changing Communities
Rethinking Rural Series, Volume 2

paperback

Matt Ehlman, Series Editor

Rethinking Rural Volume 2: Reflections on Changing Communities presents an introduction by Dwight Burlingame and insights from ten scholars and citizens as expressed in their answers to two questions: How would you describe rural America today? and What do you imagine it will be like for the next generation? Each of the authors share their concepts and their answers based on the lens through which they see the world. This anthology is the second installation in the Rethinking Rural series, aimed at highlighting how people of diverse backgrounds and experiences understand rural historically and how they foresee its future, adding to the ongoing discussion of the multifaceted nature of rural America.

Winner of the 2025 Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award
Volume 10 of the POPP Award Series

This collection of poems is a narrative, a folk tale, a ghost story, and a loose, speculative history of a strange few acres of land in Nebraska called Art Farm. We wrote it during a two-month-long artists’ residency in 2017.  

This book began as a sort of reply to an unpublished chapbook by Ben Clark and GennaRose Nethercott called, Dear Fox, Dear Barn. In that book, The Barn is a character. We began to dissect how the land of Art Farm Nebraska and its inhabitants interacted around that character. On the farm there are multiple structures in a constant state of renewal and decay. Throughout the summer and fall people live and work there, rebuilding and creating. In the winter the weather takes over. The raccoons take over. The ghosts come back. The story goes, sometime in the early 2000s, what would become The Floating Barn was being moved from another farm on huge steel I-beams. When they reached Art Farm, the barn started to shift. Instead of risking further damage they stopped moving and built a trailer-high post foundation beneath the I-beams and reinforced the damaged areas. The building seemed to float there above the prairie, dropping shingles and wall sections until it finally collapsed in a 2018 winter storm. One other structure mentioned directly in our book is a farmhouse built around 1910. Ben and I lived in that house with the mice and mosquitos and attic raccoons for two months. It was amazing. 

Over seventy years after his debut on KTLA in Los Angeles, and nearly decades after his debut on ABC in 1955, Lawrence Welk's unprecedented and almost continuous run on network, syndicated, and now public television confirms his place in American entertainment history. From his childhood in a small, German-speaking immigrant community on the North Dakota plains to one of the richest and most recognizable entertainers of his generation, Lawrence's story is a microcosm of the national experience during the American Century. 

By telling his story, author Lance Byron Richey came to understand the experience of assimilation and secularization, war and peace, and Depression and prosperity that his generation of Americans lived through in the twentieth century. In the process, the supposedly traditional and timeless values Lawrence mythologized for his audience were revealed as just as time-bound and transient as those of the Baby Boomer generation that supplanted him and his generation as the arbiters of cultural taste. 

Most importantly, though, as a man, Richey came to see Lawrence in his moral simplicity and personal complexity, a deeply good and decent man whose family often paid the price for his unquenchable desire for success and security, which his childhood on a North Dakota farm had implanted in him. In short, Welk's story is a quintessentially American story.

The first edition of Champagne Times is limited to five hundred numbered copies, all of which have been signed by the author. The book covers are SKIVERTEX Vellin #5517 blue casing, premium grade, simulated leather material debossed with gold foil. They are designed by Deb Tanner; printed and bound by Thomson Reuters Core Publishing Solutions. 

Lance Byron Richey serves as President of the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he also holds the rank of Professor of Theology. A graduate of Furman University (B.A. in History, 1988) and Conception Seminary College (Certificate of Pre-Theological Studies, 1991), he studied both Philosophy (PhD 1995) and Religious Studies (PhD, 2004) at Marquette University i Milwaukee, Wisconsin; he as published widely in both disciplines. Lance and his wife, Carol, have five children.

LCCN: 2025938196
ISBN: 978-1-946163-76-9

Volume 1: Fire in the Belly (1903-1945), 400 pp., 37 b&w photos
Volume 2: Evening Star (1945-1963), 416 pp., 39 b&w photos
Volume 3: A Rock in the Storm (1964-1992), 424 pp. including 16 color photo pp., 36 b&w photos  

Hardcover, packed in slip-case, limited edition, signed and numbered
Publication Year: 2025

Unique in its topic and methodology, Echoes of the Old Country reveals purpose and power in childhood memory for the Germans from Russia who survived and prospered on the northern Great Plains. Historian Jessica Clark’s study draws on nearly two hundred oral interviews collected during the Dakota Memories Oral History Project, conducted from 2005 to 2010. Clark and a team of oral historians and videographers recorded the voices and memories of participants as they responded to various memory prompts—browsing scrapbooks and diaries or walking through towns and cemeteries where familiar storefronts and headstones stirred vivid recollections. No history of childhood draws from such a rich oral history source. Clark reveals that second-and third-generation German-Russians adhered to a collective identity rooted in the struggles and hardships experienced by their immigrant forebears. Yet, they simultaneously forged a new identity—one that found sport in chores and responsibilities and joy in pranks and play. Their evolving self-image contrasts with narratives of toil and deprivation often associated with growing up in rural and agricultural environments.

In sincere, from-the-heart storytelling, The Shining Hands of My Ponca Ancestors depicts the life of a young, contemporary Ponca, who—with the help of friends, relatives, spirits, and ancestors—is learning what is really possible for him and his tribe and how dramatically different that is from the dominant cultural messaging of his youth. An account of inspiration, ancestor intervention, the indestructible Indigenous core of his Native people, and the immense beauty of an ongoing way of life, Shining Hands is rife with meaning for Native and non-Native readers alike. Viewed through his personal life, Shining Hands  is a prayer for the young that they may see their own powerful potential, too.

The Germans from Russia—an agricultural people who settled, survived, and prospered—formed strong ethnic communities where farmers still plant and harvest, the faithful still gather for worship, and the cooks still feed their families from the garden. This is a story of German-Russian persistence on the northern plains and its emergent consciousness—a sort of heritage husbandry—in the late twentieth century.