July 27, 2024

In only seven weeks, readers and writers will gather in Brookings for the 2024 South Dakota Festival of Books!

The presenter roster for this year’s event, Sept. 20-22, will include not only novelists, historians, poets, and children’s authors, but also an Olympic gold medalist, an award-winning radio and podcast host, and an internationally acclaimed artist. Read on for a preview!

As the 2024 Summer Olympics kick off in Paris, Billy Mills is celebrating the 60^th anniversary of his stunning come-from-behind win in the men’s 10,000-meter race at the 1964 Tokyo Games. With the help of co-author Donna Janell Bowman and illustrator S.D. Nelson, he tells his inspiring story in the new children’s book, Wings of an Eagle: The Gold Medal Dreams of Billy Mills. All three of the book’s creators will share it with youth in Sioux Falls and Brookings, and Mills will also present a Festival keynote, sponsored by the South Dakota State University Office of the President and Wokini.

Lian Dolan will bring her signature humor and heart to the Festival as she discusses her fifth best-selling novel, The Marriage Sabbatical. Dolan honed her storytelling skills as the producer and host of “Satellite Sisters,” the award-winning podcast she created with her four real sisters.

Dick Termes is a South Dakota artist whose innovative “Termespheres” – each piece a revolving three-dimensional space/time exploration of an entire closed universe – are recognized internationally. He will present at the Festival with his good friend Craig Volk, author of the new intellectual biography Dick Termes: Black Hills Artist and Visionary.

Sharing the 2024 Young Readers One Book, Juana and Lucas: Dos Grandes Changes, will be author/illustrator Juana Medina. The book, a bind-up of the first two stories in an award-winning series, introduces a spunky niña (girl) named Juana and her loyal perro (dog), Lucas. Based on Medina’s experiences growing up in Bogotá, Colombia, the charmingly illustrated book is sure to delight the 15,000 South Dakota third graders who will receive copies.

Trent Preszler, author of the 2024 One Book South Dakota, Little and Often, is another Festival headliner. The memoir, which Preszler also discussed in 12 communities around the state this summer, focuses on a single year during which he mourns the death of his estranged father by using inherited tools to build a wooden canoe. In the process, he comes to better understand his father – a cattle rancher, rodeo champion, and Vietnam War Bronze Star Medal recipient – and himself.

Other featured presenters include the following:

• Kao Kalia Yang, an acclaimed Hmong American teacher, speaker, and writer whose latest cultural memoir is Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life;
• Edward O’Keefe, award-winning broadcast journalist, CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation, and author of The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt, which examines the influence of Roosevelt’s mother, wives, and sisters;
• Rebecca Clarren, author of The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance, which melds investigative reporting with personal family history to reveal the ongoing cycle of loss of Indigenous land, culture, and resources;
• Peter Heller, adventure writer and novelist, whose latest book, Burn, is both a blistering warning about a divided country and an ode to the salvation found in chosen families;
• AND 54 MORE!

We can’t list all the Festival authors, illustrators, and scholars here, so please visit our website to see the full presenter lineup, exhibitor list, and sponsor roster! A complete schedule of events will be released in mid-August.

On the website, you can also download a digital version of the 2024 Festival Guide, which includes a preview of the event schedule. Printed copies of the Guide will be available in the September/October issue of South Dakota Magazine, as well as through SDHC in mid-August.

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