As featured in the Publishers Lunch Fall/Winter Buzz Books packet as seen at the Buzz Books Editors Panel, Windfall is one intrepid journalist's search for her long-lost great-grandmother on the American prairie. While this family mystery was what inspired her mission, climate journalist Bolstad couldn't turn a blind eye from the irrevocable environmental damage Manifest Destiny wreaked across the American West.

At first, the only thing Bolstad knew about her great-grandmother, Anna, was that she was a homesteader in the early 1900s before being committed to an asylum under mysterious circumstances. After the passing of Bolstad's mother, a windfall found its way to her--her family still owned the mineral rights to Anna's land. And oil companies were bidding for the black gold beneath the prairies.

Bolstad was drawn to the mystery of her ancestor and as a journalist well versed in the effects of fossil fuel and climate change, she felt a dissonance between what she knew of her great-grandmother and the environmental damage inflicted by the oil industry. Setting out for the North Dakota plains, Bolstad discovers a land of boom-and-bust cycles and a woman trying to eke out a living in an unforgiving landscape. She brings to life the ever-present American question: What does it mean to be rich?

A compelling and increasingly relevant thread connects thoughtful criticism of the long-lasting implications of mineral rights and the oil crisis coupled with a gripping mission to find a lost ancestor.

Erika Bolstad is a journalist and filmmaker in Portland, Oregon, and the author of Windfall. She spent a decade in Washington, DC, covering politics and environmental issues for Climatewire and the McClatchy Washington Bureau. In 2008, she was a Pulitzer finalist for her work at the Idaho Statesman. She was also a staff writer for the Miami Herald, where she covered Hurricane Katrina and other national stories. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Scientific American and many other publications.

Emily Strasser is based in Minneapolis, where she received her MFA from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and Gulf Coast, among others. Her writing has been honored by awards and fellowships including the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist’s Initiative grant, the W.K. Rose Fellowship, and the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Creative Writing. She was a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow. Half-Life of a Secret is her first book.

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