Rebecca Clarren She/Her/Hers

Award-winning journalist Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than twenty-five years. Her journalism, for which she has won the Hillman Prize, an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and 10 grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, has appeared in such publications as MotherJones, High Country News, The Nation, and Indian Country Today. Her debut novel, Kickdown (Arcade Publishing, 2018), was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize. She also writes poetry with poems appearing in such places as North American Review; her work was longlisted for the 2025 Only Poems annual prize.

Rebecca’s latest work, THE COST OF FREE LAND: JEWS, LAKOTA AND AN AMERICAN INHERITANCE, (Viking/Penguin, 2023), was named a Best Book of 2023 by Kirkus Books, The Forward, The Christian Science Monitor and The Tribal College Journal. A blend of history, journalism and memoir, THE COST investigates how 20th-century federal policies that gave her ancestors - Jews fleeing oppression in Russia - free land on the South Dakota prairie and a pathway to the middle class, came at great cost to their Lakota neighbors. The book not only retells this entangled history but grapples with what can be done to reconcile the past.

Winner of a 2021 Whiting Nonfiction Grant, THE COST OF FREE LAND is, said the jury, "a brilliantly conceived family history, one that places questions of responsibility and atonement at the center of the conversation about America's political future." The book has won the Frances Fuller Victor Award, a Will Rogers Medallion Prize, was selected as a One Book for both South Dakota and North Dakota, was shortlisted for the High Plains Book Award, the  Great Plains Book Award and was a finalist for Stanford’s Saroyan Prize.