South Dakota Festival of Books

Experience SculptureWalk Sioux Falls up close on a guided walk through downtown Sioux Falls. Discover the stories, artists, and inspiration behind the sculptures that help shape our city. Led by SculptureWalk and South Dakota Humanities Council board member Jim Mathis, you’ll explore how visual artists use form, materials, and imagination to tell stories in three dimensions.

Pull up a share and join the conversation! This informal gathering offers festival attendees an opportunity to connect with fellow readers and writers, exchange ideas, and celebrate our shared love of books and stories.

Jon K. Lauck, Director of Center for Wester Studies, leads a discussion on The Missouri River: A Cultural and Environmental History. Published in recognition of America’s 250^th anniversary, this edited collection brings together historians, scientists, and writers to explore the rivers’ natural and human history, as well as it’s enduring influence on the communities and landscapes of the American heartland.  

This poetry reading showcases a diversity of poetic styles and voices from across South Dakota. Featured poets include Marcella Remund, Holly Moseley, Robert Bordeaux, Todd Williams, John Nelson, Ruth Harper, Lawrence Diggs, Diane Douiyssi, and Bruce Roseland.

Patrick Hicks will read from his popular new book, Greater Minnesota. It’s a witty, wise, and affectionate journey to every corner of the North Star State. After years of living abroad, Hicks returns to Minnesota only to find that his home state feels like a foreign country. In the tradition of Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux, Greater Minnesota is an account of Hicks’s discoveries. Half travelogue, half history, and fully delightful, this book has become a favorite for readers all across the Midwest.

Oglala Lakota writer Tracy Hauff and book artist Richard Zauft for a literary reading and discussion of their award-winning book, Pté Oyáte (Buffalo Nation). This session will explore the book’s creation and collaborative process in bringing together stories, art, and photography as a tribute to Lakota history, traditions, and endurance. 

Photographer Paul Horsted discusses his process in locating the sites of 350 historic photos across South Dakota to create an heirloom book of then-and-now photographs titled South Dakota Yesterday & Today. Horsted explore his process of acquiring historic images and aligning his camera lens with the past, as well as share anecdotes from his projects. What can pairing historic images with contemporary photography teach us about history and the environment?

Poetry can be beautiful, funny, brutally honest, and irreverent. It can explore life’s big questions or smallest details. And it can also help in the process of healing. Listen to this reading or poems by Marcella Remund from her book Stroke, Stroke, and find out how writing the book helped her heal after experiencing a stroke. 

Join Dr. Anton Treuer and SDCTE for a roundtable, Q&A discussion session about incorporating Indigenous American culture, literature, and pedagogy in secondary and post-secondary classrooms. This session offers a space for educators and community members to come together and learn about the complexities of modern curriculum development and how we can work together to make education more representative of our unique and extraordinary region! 

This rich anthology about Sioux Falls offers an inside look at the city through the eyes of longtime residents and recent transplants. In over forty-five essays, this best-selling anthology includes topics about Sioux Falls’s status as a “divorce destination” in the late 1800s, as well as where George McGovern ended his presidential run, Joyland Park, the Pomp Room, Joe Foss, and much else. This panel will feature the two editors of City of Hustle—Jon K Lauck and Patrick Hicks—in addition to Margaret Preston, Michael Mullin, and Danny Gerling, all of whom are featured in this ground-breaking anthology.

Experience SculptureWalk Sioux Falls up close on a guided walk through downtown Sioux Falls. Discover the stories, artists, and inspiration behind the sculptures that help shape our city. Led by SculptureWalk and South Dakota Humanities Council board member Jim Mathis, you’ll explore how visual artists use form, materials, and imagination to tell stories in three dimensions. 

Picture books might look short and simple, but looks can be deceiving. Fiction and nonfiction picture books often require more research than a casual reader suspects. Illustrator Jeanne Bowman and author Pat Zietlow Miller will share how they use research to craft picture books that are the best they can be. 

Join South Dakota Poet Laureate Bruce Roseland and contributing poets for a celebration of Our South Dakota: An Anthology of Verse. Through readings of their own work, contributors will share personal reflections on the people, places, and experiences that shape life across South Dakota. Together, these voices capture a portrait of South Dakota during a time of change, preserving the stories of our communities and reminding us that everyone has a story, or poem, to share. 

This panel will focus on the mechanics of historical research, with special emphasis on the importance of archives and historical societies in creating works of history. We will hear the perspectives of historians, writers, archivists, and publishers on the use of archives and historical societies and why they are vital to historical storytelling.

Join poets Lee Roripaugh and Marcella Prokop for a reading that explores the intersections of identity, culture, memory and place. Reading from unMothered, unTongued, Roripaugh examines the complexities of language, family, and belonging within the landscapes and cultures of the American West. Prokop, reading from her chapbook Pan de Alma, explores connection and conflict related to her experience of biculturalism as a Colombian American, focusing on poems that move the speaker (and audience) through place and time through food and memory. 

Writing about the rural landscape of southern Minnesota and eastern South Dakota, Vondracek explores the relationship between his journalism and his literary nonfiction. How can memory inform reporting? And how can reporting open up new memories? Vondracek discusses his practice, particularly against the backdrop of his own upbringing, from the Farm Crisis up and through the 2020 pandemic. Vondracek will also talk the ”aesthetics” of rural life, including that famous oil painter that inspired the book.

In this session, author Matthew Davis will discuss his One Book South Dakota book A BIOGRAPHY OF A MOUNTAIN. Through the evolving meaning Mount Rushmore, Davis will discuss how we memorialize American history and how this has impacted the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Presenting on her latest book, White Lies, Bausum examines the Lost Cause, the false account of the Civil War promoted after the Confederacy’s defeat. Through research and examples from her childhood textbooks, Bausum explores how misinformation became accepted as history and continues to influence public understanding and Confederate commemoration.