Upcoming Events

Open Book
1011 Washington Ave S
Minneapolis, MN 55415

Birchbark Books is thrilled to welcome author Stephen Graham Jones for a reading and conversation about his new novel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. He will be joined by Carson Faust, author the forthcoming novel, If the Dead Belong Here.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter will be available for purchase at the event or you can preorder a copy today (pub date is March 18).

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is the story of a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the true masters of horror.

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

Join us as we welcome author Dennis Staples (This Town Sleeps) to explore his new novel, Passing Through a Prairie Country.

Passing Through a Prairie Country is a darkly humorous thriller about the ghosts that haunt the temples of excess we call casinos, and the people caught in their high-stakes, low-odds web.

For decades, a dark force has terrorized the Languille Lake reservation. Spoken of only in whispers as “the sandman,” he lurks in the Hidden Atlantis Lake Resort and Casino, the reservation’s main attraction and source of revenue, leeching its patrons’ dreams and preventing the ghosts that linger there from moving on. Fleeing a breakup, Marion Lafournier, a midtwenties Ojibwe, seeks solace in the slot machine’s siren song. Here he falls afoul of the sandman, an encounter he barely escapes through the timely intervention of his cousins Alana and Cherie, who both work at the casino and are intimately aware of the sandman’s power. Meanwhile, Glenn Nielan, recently out of the closet and an aspiring documentarian, hopes to capture the faces of the Ojibwe land while experiencing the casino’s thrills. But he will learn that all who choose to play the sandman’s games are in danger of falling into his grasp.

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)

“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 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.