The following description comes from the event organizer.

In The Cost of Free Land, this award-winning author investigates the entangled history of her Jewish family's land in South Dakota, and the Lakota, who were forced off that land by the United States government.

The Cost of Free Land was named a Best Book of 2023 by Kirkus Review, The Jewish Forward, The Tribal College Journal and The Christian Science Monitor. It's been shortlisted for the Great Plains Book Award, The High Plains Book Prize and Stanford's Saroyan Prize. The Boston Globe called it, "a monumental piece of work."

Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than twenty years. Her journalism, for which she has won the Hillman Prize and ten grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, has appeared in such publications as Mother Jones, High Country News, The Nation, and Indian Country Today. Her debut novel, Kickdown (Sky Horse Press, 2018), was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize.

This event is co-sponsored by Spoke & Word Books.

Special thanks to the Friends of the Ledding Library for providing the funding that makes this program possible.