Photo credit: Shelby Brakken

Photo credit: Shelby Brakken

Award-winning journalist Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than twenty 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 Salon.com. Her debut novel, Kickdown (Sky Horse Press, 2018), was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize.

Rebecca is currently writing THE COST OF FREE LAND: JEWS, LAKOTA AND AN AMERICAN INHERITANCE, forthcoming from Viking Penguin, October, 2023. This work of creative nonfiction 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."

Rebecca lives in Portland, Ore. can be contacted at rpclarren@gmail.com. For media inquiries, please contact Sara Leonard, Publicist with Viking/Penguin at sleonard@penguinrandomhouse.com.