Upcoming Events
Tuesday, March 19 @ 6:30pm Central
Tommy Orange: Wandering Stars
Minneapolis Central Library - Pohlad Hall, 2nd floor
In-person registration for this event is full. Register for the virtual Zoom event below.
A standby queue will also be operated outside Pohlad Hall the night of the event, should any last minute seats become available. Standby space is not guaranteed, and likely to be limited.
First print, first edition copy of Wandering Stars is now available. Click here to order yours today!
Presented in collaboration with Talk of the Stacks, Birchbark Books is proud to welcome award-winning author Tommy Orange. In 2019, the author published his debut novel, There There, to widespread critical acclaim. A winner of the PEN Award and the American Book Award, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the breakout bestseller follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.
In his new work, Wandering Stars, Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous. He once again delivers a story that is piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage, serving as a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.
Of the new book, Louise Erdrich raves: “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange. With an all-seeing heart, he traces historical and contemporary cruelties, vagaries, salvations, and solutions visited upon young Cheyenne people, who cope with the impossible. In them, Tommy finds the unnerving strength that results when a broken spirit mends itself, when a wandering star finds its place, when, in spite of everything, Native people manage to survive.”
Thursday, May 9 @ 6:30pm Central
Debra Magpie Earling in Conversation with Louise Erdrich
Minneapolis Central Library - Pohlad Hall
300 Nicollet Mall
Minneapolis, MN 55401
Join Birchbark Books along with Milkweed Editions for a special conversation between award-winning authors Debra Magpie Earling and Louise Erdrich about the power of reclaiming narrative! Debra will discuss her novels The Lost Journals of Sacajawea and Perma Red, both published by Milkweed Editions.
Earling’s novels are powerful stories about the strength and resilience of indigenous women in the wake of colonial violence. Her most recent novel reclaims Sacajewea’s life story, bringing this mythologized figure vividly to life and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history. Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told.
Free and open to the public!
Please note: Events hosted by Birchbark Books are held at our new event space:
Birchbark Bizhiw, 1629 Hennepin Avenue #275, Minneapolis, MN 55403.
Events are not held at the bookstore.
Recent Events
Tuesday, March 12 @ 5:30pm
Kao Kalia Yang Book Launch - The Rock in My Throat
Minnesota Humanities Event Center
987 Ivy Avenue East
St. Paul, MN 55106
Join AmazeWorks for the launch of author Kao Kalia Yang’s new children’s book, The Rock in My Throat, from Lerner Publishing. After an introduction from Carol Hinz (Lerner Publishing) and Rebecca Slaby (AmazeWorks), Kao Kalia Yang will read from her new book, followed by a conversation, Q&A, and book signing. Book sales by Birchbark Books. See the Eventbrite page for more details!
Tuesday, February 13 @ 7pm
A Love Letter to Minneapolis with Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl & Heid E. Erdrich
Birchbark Bizhiw
1629 Hennepin Avenue #275
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(entrance map)
Birchbark Books and Heid E. Erdrich host Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl for a special celebration of love letters to Minneapolis and to loved ones. Join Heid and Dara for a conversation, brief readings, and a guided excercise to create your own instant love letters! Purchase a ticket to secure your spot. The ticket price includes a copy of Dara's latest book, The Essential Dear Dara. You can pick up your book at the event or at Birchbark Books. Works by Heid E. Erdrich, including a limited edition poem, will also be available for purchase. Light refreshments will be served.
Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is an award-winning food writer, cultural columnist, and contributor to Gourmet, Saveur, Food & Wine, Bon Appétit, City Pages, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, and many other publications. A six-time winner of the James Beard Award for food writing, Grumdahl lives in Minneapolis.
Heid E. Erdrich is the first Minneapolis Poet Laureate. She is Ojibwe, enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain. Her most recent book of poems is Little Big Bully, winner of the National Poetry Series.
Thursday, December 7th @ 7pm
Removal Acts: Reading and Celebration with Author Erin Marie Lynch
Birchbark Bizhiw
1629 Hennepin Avenue #275
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(entrance map)
We're thrilled to welcome Erin Marie Lynch to celebrate her debut poetry collection, Removal Acts. She will be in conversation with poet and bookseller, Halee Kirkwood.
Drawing its title from the 1863 Federal Act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, this remarkable debut collection reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence. Through an array of brief lyrics, visual forms, chronologies, and sequences, these virtuosic poems trace a path through the labyrinth of distances and absences haunting the American colonial experiment.
Removal Acts takes its speaker’s fraught methods of accessing the past as both subject and material: family photos, the fragile artifacts of primary documents, and the digital abyss of web browsers and word processors. Alongside studies of two of her Dakota ancestors, Lynch has assembled an intimate record of recovery from bulimia, insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide. In these rigorous, scrutinizing examinations of “removal” in its many forms—as physical displacement, archival absence, Whiteness, and vomit—Lynch has crafted a harrowing portrait of the entwined relationship between the personal and historical. The result is a powerful affirmation of resilience and resolute presence in the face of eradication.
Erin Marie Lynch is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. Her writing appears in Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, Best New Poets, and elsewhere.
Wednesday, November 15th @ 7pm
A Song Over Miskwaa Rapids with Linda LeGarde Grover
Birchbark Bizhiw
1629 Hennepin Avenue #275
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(entrance map)
Join us for an evening with Linda LeGarde Grover celebrating her latest novel, A Song Over Miskwaa Rapids. Beginning with her award-winning debut story collection The Dance Boots and continuing with her novels The Road Back to Sweetgrass and In the Night of Memory, Linda LeGarde Grover has created and explored the imaginary Mozhay Point Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota. A Song Over Miskwaa Rapids continues to weave the intimate and complex story of Mozhay Point and its people.
Margie Robineau, fighting for her family’s long-held allotment land, uncovers events connected to a long-ago escape plan, and the burial (at once figurative and painfully real) of not one crime but two. While Margie pieces the facts together, Dale Ann is confronted by her own tightly held secrets and the truth that the long ago and the now are all indelibly linked, no matter how much we try to forget.
Linda LeGarde Grover is professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth and a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe. She has won numerous awards for her poetry and fiction.