Upcoming Events

Pohlad Hall (Downtown Central Library)
300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis MN 55401

Birchbark Books hosts Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier, joined by Heid E. Erdrich, for a reading and discussion of her new collection, We.

In We, Layli Long Soldier examines what it means to be in community, to be in relation with family, nation, history, and language. We is the first-person plural, the pronoun of inclusion in English. It is also Wé, the Lakota word meaning “blood”—what is shared and what is shed.

In this ingenious and insightful arrangement of poems, lyric essays, and her own visual artworks presented in full color, Long Soldier creates unique spaces of collaboration, mentorship, and shared knowledge. The 184 X’s signed to a broken treaty, the fringes of a winged dress braided in honor of children lost to Indian boarding schools, and intricate Lakota star quilts become shapes and patterns that convey collective kinship, memory, and grievance. “From this day forward,” Long Soldier writes, “I declare a war of language.”

We is a visionary new collection by a writer and artist whose unfolding works are among the most groundbreaking of our time.

“Layli Long Soldier's communal, revelatory, intimate collection vibrates with visual and poetic meaning. We, or Wé, is an offering to the best within us all.”—Louise Erdrich

“In We (Wé), Layli Long Soldier leads us across her poetry, storytelling, and visual artwork, creating vivid and captivating imagery, both on the page and within our imaginations. . . . I felt my life reflected as a mother, a Lakota woman, a tribal and US citizen, a human, and a relative.”—Dyani White Hawk

Plymouth Congregational Church
1919 LaSalle Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55403

Ann Patchett shares from and talks about her new novel, Whistler.

In conversation with Kate DiCamillo.

Ann Patchett returns with a moving, luminous novel that reminds us of the sweetness and impermanence of life and the power of connection to defy time.

When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn’t seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, time falls away; while their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both, and now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again.

Whistler is a story about two adults looking back over the choices they made, and the choices that were made for them. It’s a story about bravery, memory, the often small yet consequential moments that define our lives, and the endless stream of loss that in time comes for us all. Beautiful in its simplicity, it is ultimately about how love endures, and how the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change everything.

Each ticket comes with a signed copy of Whistler.

Plymouth Congregational Church
1919 LaSalle Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55403

Join us as we celebrate the publication of Louise's newest work, Python's Kiss! She will be joined in conversation with Aza Erdrich Abe.

From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich, a captivating collection of short stories

It was as though I was chosen—marked out by the python’s kiss for wisdom or maybe sorrow. Or perhaps, I think now, a sense of the ridiculous in extremes of experience. Also, I hoped for a long life.

Written over the past two decades, Louise Erdrich’s magnificent story collection features a range of characters—a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass, immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged, and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers, and romantics. A girl decides to spend her life with a stone. A man is confronted with a folk-singing thief. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife to seek revenge on her father.

Accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Aza Erdrich Abe—an intimate and revelatory creative collaboration between mother and daughter—these stories offer an oppor­tunity to celebrate the wisdom and brilliant, wide-ranging imagination of one of America’s most important writers.

NOTE: All copies of Python's Kiss available for purchase at the event will be pre-signed. There will be no signing line.

Birchbark Bizhiw
1629 Hennepin Avenue #275
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(entrance map)

Join us as we welcome author Tayari Jones to Birchbark Bizhiw! Tayari will be joined in conversation by Louise Erdrich.

Kin is the magnificent new novel from bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

“Kin is the kind of all-encompassing reading experience I’m always hoping to find: smart and funny and deftly profound. This is Tayari Jones’s very best work.” —Ann Patchett

A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.

Birchbark Bizhiw
1629 Hennepin Avenue #275
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(entrance map)

Join us as we celebrate the publication of Glassful of Prayer, the debut poetry collection from our longtime bookseller, Anthony Ceballos! He will be joined in conversation by Kimberly Blaeser, director of Indigenous Nations Poets and former Wisconsin Poet Laureate.

All copies of Glassful of Prayer purchased from Birchbark Books will be signed by the author! Order yours here.

A stunning debut collection, Anthony Ceballos' Glassful of Prayer, wrestles with questions of identity against the backdrop of loss, heritage, family ties, addiction, nature, and urban Minneapolis. Ceballos relentlessly delves into the experience of claiming and defining a self with vivid imagery of reflections and nature, and through dreamed or imagined dialogue with an alcoholic father he never knew: "I am not/my father's boy, I am not/his body, I am not nobody.." In another poem, his grandmother's spirit asks, "Who? Who do you want to be?" Ceballos connects these themes of negative and positive identity through a single thread prevalent throughout the collection, authenticity, leading us through a landscape of darkness and ash to a place of self-acceptance and love.

“It is rare to open a book that makes you feel more alive. Anthony Ceballos uses language with passion and precision to conjure a world marked by tenderness. In his quest to resolve our common sorrows, and his own, Ceballos resists the temptations of oblivion with a fierce insistence on clarity and love.”
- Louise Erdrich