Erika Bolstad Book Signing Saturday in Williston at Books on Broadway

Erika Bolstad is a journalist and the author of Windfall, a narrative nonfiction book out from Sourcebooks. Bolstad has visited this area researching her family history and mineral ownership in Divide county. Her great-grandmother Anna homesteaded in Larson, ND (Divide County). Erika Bolstad will be in Williston for a Windfall book signing at Books on Broadway on Saturday, May 6 from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM.

Set on the prairies of North Dakota. Windfall begins with a mysterious email that arrives shortly before Erika's mother's death, saying she'd inherited mineral rights.  At the height of the oil boom, Erika set out to discover the significance of the bequest.

The only thing Erika initially knew about her great-grandmother Anna was that she had homesteaded on the North Dakota prairies in the early 1900s before her husband mysteriously committed her to an asylum. She divulged more when Erika's mother grew ill. Oil corporations were interested in the black gold that lay beneath the prairies, and their family still owned the mineral rights to Anna's property. Erika discovered that the heritage of a woman who was almost lost to history could make their family very wealthy.

Few pictures of Anna have survived, and she left no journals or letters. Erika headed off for North Dakota to discover as much as she could about the past in an effort to understand more about her great-grandmother and the oil industry that permanently altered the look of the American West. What she finds is a country with boom-and-bust cycles and families struggling to make ends meet.

Williston is the final stop on Bolstad's North Dakota book signing tour so take advantage of this exciting opportunity to meet and visit with the author of Windfall. The book is a family history and a great example of the oil boom of this area and many will be able to relate to the story.

In 2022, Bolstad was the recipient of an environmental art grant from the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation. The grant supports a companion short film to Windfall.