Recent Releases

Never Make Them Cry

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Steve Semken

When My Husband Ran For President and Other Short Stories

Posted on September 5, 2024 by Steve Semken

When My Husband Ran For President and Other Short Stories | Ruth Harkin | 9781948509534 | $20 | 144p | Trade paper | All author proceeds will go to The Tom and Ruth Harkin Institute Story in USA Today […]

The Beautiful Land

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Steve Semken

Lovers of historical fiction will find this new novel The Beautiful Land, The Future State of Iowa, 1835-1838 fascinating and informative. […]

Grant Wood’s Memorial Masterpiece

Posted on August 6, 2024 by Steve Semken

Dancing In A Disabled World

Posted on July 15, 2024 by Steve Semken

A candid, behind the curtains consideration of disability and being human. On Being Human Differently […]

The Swine Republic

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Steve Semken

Takes a long hard look at the science, politics, culture, and economics of Iowa agriculture and the state’s degraded waters and connects the dots for everyone who wonders why progress toward improvement is so maddeningly slow in Iowa and the rest of the farmed Midwest. […]

Even So

Posted on April 26, 2024 by Steve Semken

A book about overcoming the odds and finding your way; it’s about breaking barriers and transcending one’s original station in life; it’s about courage in the face of adversity; and it’s about accepting one’s uniqueness rather than trying to change it. The main character is a farm kid growing up in Iowa in the ’60s and ’70s amongst a family of ten … […]

Inside Voices

Posted on April 15, 2024 by Steve Semken

For fifteen months Amy Kolen traveled between two very different worlds: a medium-security men’s prison, where she participated as an outside singer in the prison choir, and the confines of her mother’s room in a health center, where her mother required round-the-clock care following a massive stroke. Inside Voices speaks to our longing for human connection and is a testament to how embracing new experiences with “beginners mind” can deepen understanding and bring inner peace. […]

My Father Called Us Monkeys

Posted on December 21, 2023 by Steve Semken

Introducing Marco. Short stories inspired by growing up Mexican-American in a small town in Western Illinois that was almost entirely white in the 1960s. […]

Emmi

Posted on April 16, 2023 by Steve Semken

Emmi | Sandy Moffett | 9781948509565 | $21.99 | 246p | Trade paper A second novel by Sandy Moffett. Emily Reese, an eleven-year-old girl who has trouble reading, trouble with numbers, trouble with school, trouble with friends, who is only happy when she is alone in a special wild place that she considers her own. […]

Marrying Kind

Posted on November 22, 2022 by Steve Semken

K. L. Cook | ISBN 9781948509114 | 302p | $21.95 | Short Stories “The collection ends with a definitive bang, and demonstrates how, in an excellently crafted story collection, the whole is always more than the sum of its parts. Cook’s Marrying Kind delivers just as much complexity and nuance as any novel, while providing […]

Birds In The Morning

Posted on April 9, 2021 by Steve Semken

Lyrical meditations on rural life braided with observations from her global public health and medical practice with struggles raising an autistic son and all the beauty and challenges brought by the creatures that surround her wild Iowa home. An instant environmental classic. An updated Leopold Land Ethics book. […]

The Way of Nile C. Kinnick, Jr.

Posted on September 17, 2020 by Steve Semken

… The Way of Nile C. Kinnick Jr.: Insights, Images, and Stories of Iowa’s 1939 Heisman Trophy Winner. 2018 marks the hundredth anniversary of one of Iowa’s most notable native sons. Read more… […]

A Certain Arc

Posted on April 4, 2020 by Steve Semken

A Certain Arc follows Hamilton through a university career where he encounters and participates in the culture of writers and writing. Beginning with “Hometown,” which portrays his origins, […]

Tallgrass Conversations

Posted on November 14, 2019 by Steve Semken

Coming Soon … Poetic, beautiful, meditative, and informative. Through short writings and photographs, enter a conversation to inspire new understandings of the Midwestern tallgrass prairie …Read more… […]

Country Views

Posted on September 10, 2019 by Steve Semken

Fresh and far-ranging, these timely commentaries illuminate an important paradox: how, as the population living on the land plummets, the popularity of agrarianism rises anew. […]