South Dakota Festival of Books
The Festival of Books, "Where Readers and Writers Rendezvous," brings together more than 50 of the top national, regional and South Dakota authors as they share their life and work. Presentations focus in the areas of fiction, non-fiction, history/tribal writing, children's literature, writers' support and poetry.
Featured Presenters
Rick Bass
Dubbed “nature Writer’ by bookstores and critics, Rick Bass’s works are concerned with the nature of the human heart and the heart of nature. The son of a geologist, Bass took an early interest in the natural world. He earned a B.S. at Utah State University in 1979 and worked as a petroleum geologist for several years. Bass has lived around the South and Southwest, including stints in Mississippi from 1979 to 1987 as a petroleum geologist in charge of prospecting for new wells, an experience that formed the basis for his book Oil Notes. He currently lives and works in Missoula, Montana.
Marilyn Chin
Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. Chin has won numerous awards for her poetry, including ones from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has received a Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, four Pushcart Prizes, the Paterson Prize, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan. She co-directs the MFA program at San Diego State University.
Quincy Troupe
Quincy Troupe is an award-winning poet and the author of of eight volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and six non-fiction works. The first official poet laureate of the State of California, Troupe is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He lives in New York City, where he edits Black Renaissance Noire (to be renamed Baobab), a literary journal published by New York University. His screenplay based on his memoir Miles & Me is scheduled for production Fall 2009, as a major motion picture starring Samuel L. Jackson and Laurence Fishburne.
Gary Schmidt
Gary D. Schmidt is the author of more than fifteen books for children and young adults, including The Wednesday Wars, a 2008 Newbery Honor Award winner, and Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, which won a Newbery Honor award and a Michael L. Printz Honor award in 2005. His newest novel, Trouble, came out in spring 2008. He is a professor in the English department at Calvin College and lives on a farm in Alto, Michigan, with his wife and six children.
Linda Hasselstrom
Linda Hasselstrom is an award-winning poet and writer of the High Plains whose work is rooted in the landscape of western South Dakota. Linda conducts writing retreats on her Hermosa-area family ranch, where she is working with the Great Plains Native Plant Society and the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory to improve grassland and riparian habitat for plants and wildlife. Linda’s non-fiction includes No Place Like Home: Notes From a Western Life, Between Grass and Sky, Feels Like Far, Land Circle, Going Over East, Windbreak, Bison: Monarch of the Plains, and Roadside History of South Dakota. Her poetry books include Bitter Creek Junction and Dakota Bones. Linda was also a co-editor, with Nancy Curtis and Gaydell Collier, of the western women's anthologies Leaning into the Wind, Woven on the Wind, and Crazy Woman Creek.
Craig Johnson
Craig Johnson is the author of the Book Sense and Killer picks Death Without Company and The Cold Dish, both featuring Walt Longmire. The Cold Dish was also chosen as a DILYS finalist, and Death Without Company received the Wyoming Historical Society Award for fiction as well as being a finalist for The Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award. Another Man’s Moccasins, the fourth in the series won the Spur Award for the Western Writers of America Novel of the Year. Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five.
VIEW THE FULL LIST OF PRESENTERS