Upcoming Events

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

“Save Me, Stranger is a book of parables—supernal and sinister. Disturbing but comforting. Read these stories with a buddy, because someone will have to scrape you off the floor.” —Louise Erdrich

Erika Krouse's debut memoir, Tell Me Everything, was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “lyrical, jarring, propulsive,” and the Washington Post as “mesmerizing on every page.” Now, with an electrifying new collection of stories, Save Me, Stranger, she further cements her reputation as an essential voice.

From the coldest town on earth to a sex shop in Bangkok to a haunted bed-and-breakfast in the Rockies, we meet characters at hinge moments. A runaway fights for her future while driving an ice-cream truck in gang territory; a cleaning woman investigates the teenager who died in her stead; a terminal patient in Alaska discovers new life in helping others die. This collection explores the borderlands between humor and hurt, community and self, and hope and despair, redefining what it means to survive.

Scalpel-sharp, unsparingly funny, and achingly wise, Krouse's expansive stories build to unforgettable emotional catharses, as these men and women must decide how far they are willing to go to save one another—and themselves.

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

Join us for a wonderful conversation between author Eowyn Ivey and Louise Erdrich as they discuss Eowyn's new novel, Black Woods, Blue Sky.

“Black Woods, Blue Sky is a fable about what it is to love, a tale of longing, a call to renew our deepest bonds with the living world.” —Louise Erdrich

Birdie's keeping it together, of course she is. So she's a little hungover on her shifts, and has to bring her daughter to the lodge while she waits tables, but Emaleen never goes hungry. It's a tough town to be a single mother, and Birdie just needs to get by.

And then Birdie meets Arthur, who is quieter than most men, but makes her want to listen; who is gentle with Emaleen, and understands Birdie's fascination with the mountains in whose shadow they live. When Arthur asks Birdie and Emaleen to leave the lodge and make a home, just the three of them, in his off-grid cabin, Birdie's answer, in a heartbeat, is yes.

Out in the wilderness Birdie's days are harsher and richer than she ever imagined possible. Here she will feel truly at one with nature. Here she, and Emaleen, will learn the whole, fearful truth about Arthur.

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

Join us for a special joint collaboration between Birchbark Books and The Institute of American Indian Arts as they bring together three phenomenal authors, Pam Houston, Mona Susan Power, and Deborah Jackson Taffah, for an evening of wonderful, inspiring and insightful conversation.

Pam Houston is the author of the memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, as well as two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, two collections of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, as well as a book of essay between Pam and environmental activist Amy Irvine, called Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics and Place. Her latest book, Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood and Freedom, was published in September 2024.

Mona Susan Power is the author of four books of fiction, including The Grass Dancer (a National Bestseller awarded a PEN/Hemingway Prize), Roofwalker (a collection of stories and essays awarded the Milkweed National Fiction Prize), Sacred Wilderness (a novel which received the Electa Quinney Award), and A Council of Dolls (winner of the Minnesota Book Award and High Plains Book Award, longlisted for the National Book Award and the Carol Shields Prize).

Deborah Jackson Taffa’s Whiskey Tender, a 2024 National Book Award Finalist, was also a 2025 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction longlisted title. Named one of 2024’s Top 10 books by The Atlantic, Audible, and Time Magazine, her debut was also included on best and notable lists at The New Yorker, Elle, Esquire, NPR, The Washington Post, Oprah Daily, and Publisher’s Weekly.

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

Join us for a wonderful evening with Rebecca Nagel, author of By the Fire We Carry.

Please Note: Masks are required for this event.

Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. Nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests—in the emergence of this great nation, our government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples. That changed on July 9, 2020, when a high-profile Supreme Court case—which originated with a small-town murder two decades earlier—affirmed the reservation of Muscogee Nation. The ruling resulted in the largest restoration of tribal land in U.S. history, merely because the Court chose to follow the law.

Here Rebecca Nagle tells the story of the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in Eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed in its long history of greed, corruption and lawlessness, and the Native battle for the right to be here that has shaped our country.

Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning reporter, writer, and citizen of Cherokee Nation. She is the creator and host of Crooked Media’s chart-topping podcast This Land.

Minneapolis Central Library
Pohlad Hall, 2nd Floor
300 Nicollet Mall
Minneapolis, MN 55401

Join Birchbark Books and Native Arts along Hennepin County Library as we welcome beloved author Hanif Abdurraqib, who will talk about his most recent book, There's Always This Year. This event will dedicate the majority of time for an audience Q&A, so please plan to come with your questions!

There's Always This Year is a powerful reflection on basketball, life, and home—from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America.

Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jump shot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.”

There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it’s basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.

“Mesmerizing . . . not only the most original sports book I’ve ever read but one of the most moving books I’ve ever read, period.”—Steve James, director of Hoop Dreams

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

Join us for the launch event of author and former but forever Birchbark staff member James Vukelich's wonderful new children's book, Wisdom Weavers: Explore the Ojibwe Language and the Meaning of Dream Catchers! This is a kid-friendly event with a reading of the book and an audience Q&A. James will also do a live demonstration of making a dream catcher!

Order the book here: Wisdom Weavers

Follow a day in the life of a young, mixed heritage Ojibwe child and learn key words and phrases from the Ojibwe language in this enchantingly illustrated children's book.

The Ojibwe people are the largest Indigenous group of Turtle Island, now known as North America, and live around the present-day Great Lakes. After their land was taken by Europeans, many Ojibwe children were placed in boarding schools that forbid them to use their native language. Though this led to a decline in fluent speakers, there is a growing movement to restore the strength of the Ojibwe language.

In Ojibwe culture, a dream catcher (izhi'on) protects people, especially children, from harm by catching bad dreams in its web and allowing good dreams to pass through the feathers hanging at the bottom. Wisdom Weavers introduces children to the Ojibwe language from an Indigenous perspective.

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

We are thrilled to host the publication event for Marcie Rendon's new poetry collection, Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium. Marcie will be joined in conversation by Lyz Jaakola with an opening song by Mark Erickson, an Anishinaabe traditional singer

In Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium, Marcie R. Rendon summons her ancestors’ songs, and her poem-songs evoke the world still unfolding around us, reflecting our place in time for future generations. Bringing memory to life, the senses to attention, she breaks the boundaries that time would impose, carrying the Anishinaabe way of life forward in the world.

"This collection undoubtedly sings through and for generations to come! These powerful poems ask us to trust the wind to catch and carry our songs and prayers. Through each page, Marcie R. Rendon guides us to radically dream a future of strength and reminds us that ‘Win or lose, there’s dancing to be done." - Tanaya Winder, author of Words Like Love

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

Travel through a garden’s seasons toward healing, reclamation, and wholeness—for us, and for our beloved relative, the Earth

In this rich collection of prose, poetry, and recipes, Teresa Peterson shares how she found refuge from the struggle to reconcile her Christianity and Dakota spirituality, discovering solace and ceremony in communing with the earth. Perennial Ceremony brings us into this relationship, as Peterson guides us through the Dakota seasons to impart lessons from her life as a gardener, gatherer, and lover of the land.

"Perennial Ceremony is a powerful, necessary gift for our times. Teresa Peterson writes with passionate grace of Dakota practices and teachings that nourish our world and transformed her life. With compassion, humor, wisdom, and courage, she offers a path through the disastrous fires of our own making. A book I'll return to again and again for solace, guidance, delectable recipes, and most of all: inspiration." — Mona Susan Power, author of A Council of Dolls