Erika Bolstad is author of Windfall, a narrative nonfiction project published by Sourcebooks in January 2023. Set on the prairies of North Dakota. Windfall begins with a mysterious email that arrives from Erika’s mother shortly before her death, saying she’d inherited mineral rights. Erika set out at the height of the oil boom to unearth the story behind the bequest, in search of the source of the whispers heard on the Great Plains: We could be rich.
Erika wrote about climate change adaptation in the United States for E&E’s Climatewire. In that job she traveled the country covering the intersection of politics, science, business and culture, with an emphasis on how people across America are coping with climate change in their neighborhoods.
Before that, she was a reporter in the McClatchy Washington Bureau, where she wrote about environmental issues and served as the Washington correspondent for the Miami Herald. Erika also spent four years in the bureau covering Washington for the Anchorage Daily News and the Idaho Statesman. Her work on the Larry Craig scandal for the Statesman was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news.
At the Miami Herald, Erika covered politics, the state legislature, local government and hurricanes — including Hurricane Katrina from New Orleans. She got my start as a journalist at the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., and The Item in Sumter, S.C. In March 2020, she completed a master’s degree in multimedia journalism at the University of Oregon.
“A vital exploration of the long history of abuse against women, the land, and the weight of inheritance, told in gripping prose. Bolstad’s Windfall comes at a crucial time when our country is at a reckoning with its own dark history of conquest and extraction.” – Taylor Brorby, author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land
