2012 Presenters: A-G

David Abrams

David Abrams was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Jackson, Wyoming. He earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, The Literarian, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The North Dakota Review and other literary quarterlies. Abrams retired in 2008 after a 20-year career in the active-duty Army as a journalist. He was named the Department of Defense's Military Journalist of the Year in 1994. He now lives in Butte, Montana with his wife.

Recent/notable work:

• Fobbit

Sherman Alexie

http://www.fallsapart.com/index

Sherman Alexie is the author of twenty-two books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, winner of the 2007 National Book Award for Young People's Literature, War Dances, winner of the 2010 PEN Faulkner Award, and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, a PEN Hemingway Special Citation winner. He is also the winner of the 2001 PEN Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story. Smoke Signals, the film he wrote and co-produced, won the Audience Award and Filmmakers' Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. He lives with his family in Seattle, Washington.

Recent/notable work:

• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian
• Blasphemy

Festival special events:

Sept. 26 Griffith Honors Forum Lecture (festival kickoff)

Ellen Baker

Ellen Baker was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and grew up in Wisconsin, Illinois, and South Dakota. She has worked as a costumed living history interpreter, a curator of a World War II museum, and as a bookseller and event coordinator at an independent bookstore.  She lives in Minnesota and Maine. 

Recent/notable work:

• I Gave My Heart to Know This
• Keeping the House

Jeff Barnes

www.theCusterGuide.com

An Omaha native and fifth-generation Nebraskan, Jeff Barnes is an independent writer and historian with an emphasis in the Old West. Barnes is a past chairman of the Nebraska Hall of Fame Commission and marketing director for the Durham Museum, and is a speaker with the Nebraska Humanities Council. He has presented before the Mountain-Plains Museum Association, the South Dakota State Historical Society Annual Conference, and the Fort Robinson History Conference, along with numerous national and state historical sites, museums and libraries.

Recent/notable work:

• Forts of the Northern Plains
• The Great Plains Guide to Custer

Elizabeth Berg

Elizabeth Berg was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on December 2, 1948, in a hospital that has been torn down. Her father reenlisted in the Army when she was 3 years old, and she spent her youth moving around a lot. She submitted her first poem to American Girl magazine when she was nine years old. It was rejected, and it took twenty-five years before she submitted anything again. Then, she entered a contest in a magazine and won, and subsequently wrote for magazines for ten years, then moved into novels and hasn’t stopped yet. She has two daughters and three grandchildren. She lives with her excellent dog, Homer, and cat, Gracie, mostly in Chicago, but sometimes in Boston or Wisconsin. 

Recent/notable work:

• Once Upon a Time, There Was You

Festival special events:

Sept. 28 "On Writing"at 10 a.m.

Sept. 28 "Book-Lovers' Luncheon" at 12 p.m.

Sept. 28 "Literary Feast" at 6 p.m.

Sherwin Bitsui

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is Dine of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani (Many Goats Clan). He holds a BA from University of Arizona and an AFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is the recipient of a Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, an Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, a Lannan Foundation Marfa Residency, and many other awards.

Recent/notable work:

• Shapeshift
• Flood Song

Roy Blount Jr.

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of 22 books, about everything from the first woman president of the United States to what barnyard animals are thinking. He is a panelist on NPR's Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me, ex-president of the Authors Guild, a member of PEN and the Fellowship of Southern Authors, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, a Boston Public Library Literary Light, a usage consultant to the American Heritage Dictionary, and an original member of the Rock Bottom Remainders. He comes from Decatur, Georgia and lives in western Massachusetts. In 2009 he received the Thomas Wolfe Award from the University of North Carolina.

Recent/notable work:

• Alphabetter Juice

Deborah Blum

There was probably no way for Deborah Blum to grow up as anything but a science writer. Her father, an exuberant entomologist, liked to bring his research home. Her mother, a freelance writer, published a family newspaper and drafted her four daughters as staff reporters. Her latest book, the critically acclaimed The Poisoner's Handbook, was published in hardback in 2010 and in paperback in 2011, promptly becoming a New York Times paperback best seller. Blum is married to a fellow writer, Peter Haugen. They have two sons.

Recent/notable work:

• The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

Kevin Boekhoff

http://KevinTBoekhoff.wordpress.com/
Kevin Boekhoff resides in Sioux Falls, SD, with his wife, Katie, and their Yorkshire Terrier, T-Bone Dickens. Boekhoff graduated from Pacific Coast Baptist Bible College with a Bachelor of Arts in Theology. He served as pastor of a baptist church in North Idaho for ten years and currently serves the Lord at Eastside Baptist Church. He has worked many different ministries from leading Junior Church, bus captain, pastor, prison worker, pulpit supply, teacher, and soulwinner. He also spends much of his time writing creatively. He has been published in a variety of publications. He currently serves on the board of the Parkinson’s Association of South Dakota (PASD).

Recent/notable work:

• I Forgot That I Remembered
• I Know What You Know

Morgan Callan-Rogers

Morgan Callan Rogers is the author of Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea. She grew up in Bath, Maine, an historical shipbuilding city situated on the Kennebec River. Growing up, she spent her summers in a small cottage with her parents and three siblings, exploring the woods and fields with the family dogs, wandering along the rocky shore of the New Meadows River, swimming off the rocks, reading anything she could get her hands on, and writing stories at a rickety table located on a screen porch. She has been, in her lifetime, a librarian, a journalist, an actress, an editor, and a teacher. She holds a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea is her debut novel. It was published in Germany as Rubinrotes Herz, Eisblaue See in July 2010, where it won a Reader’s Choice award in general literature (click here for more info). Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea will be published both in Spain and in Australia in 2012. She currently splits her time between her beloved Maine and western South Dakota. She is busy writing another novel.

Recent/notable work:

• Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea

Bruce and Kim Campbell

For many years the Campbells have enjoyed cooking and baking South Dakota’s wild game for their friends and family. After a hunt, their kitchen buzzes with activity and is filled with delicious aromas. They experimented with literally hundreds of different flavors before finding their great-tasting combinations. As with many novice cooks, they didn’t write out recipes on paper. One day someone asked for their Rooster Roll-Ups (p.35) recipe, and they realized that almost every pheasant recipe they had developed was not written down anywhere. So they began their journey to write a cookbook. The Campbells wanted to leave a legacy of wonderful South Dakota pheasant recipes, as well as offer a “Dakota twist” by creating pheasant dishes with an international flavor. They hope that you will enjoy making all of the dishes in their collection of recipes as much as they have enjoyed creating them.

Recent/notable work:

• Broosters Dakota Cuisine Cookbook

Ann Charles
http://www.anncharles.com

Ann Charles writes mysteries full of mayhem, humor, and a splash of romance. Ann has a B.A. in English with an emphasis on creative writing from the University of Washington. A winner of the prestigious Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense, she has been a member of Sisters in Crime and Romance Writers of America for many moons. Ann has written several contemporary novels and series, and she is currently toiling away on her next book.

Recent/notable work:

• Nearly Departed in Deadwood
• Optical Delusions in Deadwood
• Dead Case in Deadwood
• Dance of he Winnebagos
• Jackrabbit Junction Jitters

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Elizabeth did her undergraduate work at South Dakota State College (now South Dakota State University) in English and Journalism, graduating with a BA in English and journalism in 1952. She obtained her Masters of Education from the University of South Dakota in Education, Psychology and Counseling in 1971. She was in a doctoral program at the University of Nebraska in 1977-78 and was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Stanford University in 1976. She spent most of her academic career as Professor of English and Native American Studies at Eastern Washington University in Cheney from 1971 until her retirement.

Recent/notable work:

• New Indians, Old Wars
• Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
• Then Badger Said This

Tina Nichols Coury

Tina Nichols Coury is an author, award-winning multi-media artist, blogger, vlogger, producer of book trailers and all around Renaissance woman. In character as “The Rushmore Kid” she visits schools across the United States to present her popular "Why I Love America” program, which promotes an understanding and appreciation of the essential qualities that make America great. Tina grew up in L.A. as the youngest of four children to a single saint of a mom. While attending twelve years of parochial school, she found writing a sure way to get out of homework.
Tina currently lives and works on the beach in Oxnard, California with her husband Al, their Doberman, Honey, and the Keyboard Kitties, Toulouse and Monet.

Recent/notable work:

• Hanging off Jefferson's Nose

Tom Dempster

Tom Dempster's camera has been with him on travels to India, Syria, Lebanon, the Philippines, Europe, Taiwan, Colombia, Iceland, and, of course, South Dakota. He is a freelance writer and photographer and has been published in the International Herald Tribune, Sailing Magazine, South Dakota Magazine, South Dakota Photographed and South Dakota's Best Stories. Dempster is the former assistant majority leader of the South Dakota Senate, and former chairman of the State Affairs Committee. He served as Minnehaha County Commissioner for nine years. He is a University of South Dakota graduate with a BA in economics. He works as a financial advisor and lives in Sioux Falls with his wife Patti. They have three daughters, Elizabeth, Jennifer and Ann, and two sons-in-law, whose families persist in growing.       

Recent/notable work:

• Behold (photography and poetry book with Kathryn Timpany)
• North of Twelfth Street: The Changing Face of Sioux Falls Neighborhoods

Pete Dexter

Pete Dexter began his working life with a U.S. Post office in New Orleans, Louisiana. He wasn't very good at mail and quit, then caught on as a newspaper reporter in Florida, which he was not very good at, got married, and was not very good at that. In Philadelphia he became a newspaper columnist, which he was pretty good at, and got divorced, which you would have to say he was good at because it only cost $300. Dexter remarried, won the National Book Award and built a house in the desert so remote that there is no postal service. He's out there six months a year, pecking away at the typewriter, living proof of the adage What goes around comes around--that is, you quit the post office, pal, and the post office quits you.

Recent/notable work:

• Spooner
• Paris Trout

John Dufresne

www.johndufresne.com

Writer and teacher John Dufresne's novels include Louisiana Power & Light, Love Warps the Mind a Little, Deep in the Shade of Paradice, and Requiem, Mass. He has recently produced a writing guide entitled "The Lie That Tells a Truth: a Guide to Writing Fiction". His short story "The Timing of Unfelt Smiles" was included in Miami Noir and in Best American Mystery Stories 2007. He has written a full-length play, Trailerville, which was produced at the Blue Heron Theatre in New York in 2005. He currently teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

Recent/notable work:

• Requiem, Mass.
• The Lie That Tells a Truth: a Guide to Writing Fiction
• Is Life Like This?
• Blue Christmas

Festival special events:

Sept. 28 "Writing Your First Novel in Six Months" at 10 a.m.

Clyde Edgerton

Clyde Edgerton is the author of ten novels, a memoir, and numerous short stories, and essays. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and five of his novels have been New York Times Notable Books. He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and teaches creative writing at UNC Wilmington. He lives in Wilmington, NC, with his wife, Kristina, and their children.

Recent/notable work:

• Walking Across Egypt

Leif Enger

Enger was born in 1961 and raised in Osakis, Minnesota. Since his teens, he wanted to write fiction. He worked as a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio from 1984 until the sale of Peace Like a River to publisher Grove/Atlantic allowed him to take time off to write. In the early 1990s, he and his older brother, Lin, writing under the pen name L.L. Enger, produced a series of mystery novels featuring a retired baseball player. He is married and lives with his wife and two sons.

Recent/notable work:

• Peace Like a River

Festival special events:

"Literary Feast" Sept. 28 at 6 p.m.

Heid Erdrich

A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibway, Heid Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. She earned degrees from Dartmouth College and The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. A recipient of Minnesota State Arts Board fellowships, awards from The Loft Literary Center, the Archibald Bush Foundation and elsewhere, Heid Erdrich has four times been nominated for the Minnesota Book Award which she won in 2009 for her book National Monuments from Michigan State University Press.

Recent/notable work:

• Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems

Festival special events:

Sept. 28 "Writing Poetry" workshop at 10 a.m.

David Allan Evans

South Dakota’s Poet Laureate was born in Sioux City, Iowa in 1940. David Allan Evans went to college on a football scholarship, and by the time he graduated, he was writing poems and short stories. He lived in Brookings South Dakota from 1968 to 2006, where he was a professor of English and Writer in Residence at South Dakota State University. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, and the author or editor of seven other books. In 1974 he was the first South Dakotan to receive a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. He was a Fulbright Scholar two times in China—once in Nanjing, and once in Guangzhou, and an SDSU faculty-exchange professor in Kunming, China for one semester.

Sebastian Felix Braun

Sebastian is Associate Professor and Chair of the Indian Studies Department at the University of North Dakota. Before he moved to the Plains, he loved mountain biking in Switzerland, where he grew up and studied ethnology, history and philosophy at Universität Basel before earning a PhD in anthropology from Indiana University. His work deals with the intersections of culture, economy, ecology, and politics. Sebastian is teaching courses on health, languages, identity, politics, and economic development. He is currently finishing an edited volume on the methods and theories of North American ethnohistory, developing an ethnohistory of listening. He loves big skies and beautiful mountains and is kept reasonably sane by his wife, twins, and dog that thankfully live in Grand Forks with him.

Recent/notable work:

• Buffalo Inc. American Indians and Economic Development
• Native American Studies. An Interdisciplinary Introduction (second edition)

Rob Fleder

Rob Fleder joined Sports Illustrated as a senior editor in 1986, left in 1989, and returned in 1991 to assume the position of features editor. In 1995, he was promoted to assistant managing editor, and in 1996, to executive editor. Fleder earned a BA degree from Brown University and an M.S.J. in journalism from Columbia University. He has worked at number publications including Esquire, Playboy, and The National. He lives in suburban New York with his wife and three children.

Recent/notable work:

• Damned Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World's Most Loved (and Hated) Team. 
• Sports Illustrated: The Football Club
• Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, A Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage
• Sports Illustrated: Great Football Writing

Adam Fortunate Eagle

Adam Fortunate Eagle was born on the Chippewa Reservation in Red Lake, Minnesota. As was common practice during his day, he was raised in an Indian boarding school. He attended the Haskell Indian Institute in Kansas, where he met his wife, Bobbi. Eagle is the Spiritual Leader of the Keepers of the Sacred Tradition of Pipemakers, and was an organizer of the Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island. He has an offbeat sense of humor and once garnered worldwide attention by stepping off a plane in Italy, driving a spear into the ground and claiming Italy for the Native American people based on the same Right of Discovery used by Columbus to claim Hispaniola. Currently, he lives with his wife on her Shoshone-Paiute reservation near Fallon, Nevada.

Recent/notable work:

• Pipestone: My Life in an Indian Boarding School

Josh Garrett-Davis

Josh Garrett-Davis grew up in Aberdeen, Hot Springs, and Pierre, South Dakota. His book, Ghost dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains, was published in August 2012 by Little Brown. His essays have been published in Dislocate, South Dakota History Quarterly, the Rumpus, Lapham's Quarterly online, the Iowa Review online, and other places. He received an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University and began a PhD in American history at Princeton in 2011. He lives in Philadelphia with his sweetheart, Marina Libel.

Recent/notable work:

• Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains
• The Sioux in South Dakota History: A Twentieth Century Reader