Nonfiction
Nonfiction writers from Minnesota.
Tony Dierckins
Tony Dierckins, Duluth author and Saint Paul native, has written or co-written more than two dozen books. His regional history books include Crossing the Canal: An Illustrated History of Duluth’s Aerial Bridge and Lost Duluth: Landmarks, Industries, Buildings, Homes, and the Neighborhoods in Which They Stood (both finalists for the Minnesota Book Award). His work…
Thomas Fisher
Thomas Fisher is a Professor in the School of Architecture, Director of the Minnesota Design Center, and former Dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. A graduate of Cornell University in architecture and Case Western Reserve University in intellectual history, he was the Editorial Director of Progressive Architecture magazine and was…
Shannon Gibney
Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color, a young adult novel that won the 2016 Minnesota Book Award in Young Peoples’ Literature. Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, where she teaches critical and creative writing, journalism, and African Diasporic topics. A Bush Artist…
Cary J. Griffith
Cary Griffith was born and raised in the rampant verdure of the Upper Midwest and spent many hours wading the clear waters of Indian Creek. During his sophomore year in college he read Hemingway’s short story “Big Two-Hearted River” and was spellbound by Nick’s camping trip and fly fishing the Big Two-Hearted. The experience led…
Linda LeGarde Grover
Linda LeGarde Grover is a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe and a professor emeritus of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Her works reflect her scholarly research on federal policy and American Indian families. Her fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have received the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Northeastern Minnesota…
Rachael Hanel
Rachael Hanel is a nonfiction writer and the author of Not the Camilla We Knew: One Woman’s Path from Small-town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army, forthcoming in Fall 2022. She is also the author of We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter. The book was a finalist…
Jane King Hession
Jane King Hession is an architectural historian with an interest in 20th-century design. She earned her M.Arch from the University of Minnesota. In her writing, she strives to understand architecture within the contexts of the lives and times of its creators. Her work has been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies…
R.W. Holmen
R. W. Holmen is a former trial attorney with an eye for history and a heart for social justice. A Wretched Man remembers Paul the Apostle, and Wormwood and Gall (a Midwest Book Award finalist) fictionalizes Mark, the author of the first gospel. Queer Clergy (a Minnesota Book Award finalist) recounts the struggle for queer…
Melanie Hoffert
Melanie Hoffert is the author of Prairie Silence, which won the 2014 Minnesota Book Award in Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. She has been published in several literary journals. The Baltimore Review and the New Millennium Writings each selected her work for a Creative Nonfiction Writing Award. She has taught several writing classes, including at the…
Nancy Koester
Nancy Koester is the author of Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life and the winner of the Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction in 2015. American history and women’s biography are her special areas of interest. She has served as an ELCA pastor and holds both an MDiv and Ph.D. degree. She and her husband…