North Star Press

03/14/2026

Hey everyone, put the Steeple Center in Rosemount on your pre-blizzard errand list. The Rosemount Writers Fair is on now until 4:30. Come say hi and grab a new novel or book of poetry to read as the snow comes down.

01/23/2026

North Star Press will be closed today in solidarity with the General Strike happening across Minnesota today.

What is happening in our communities is unacceptable--even here in St Cloud, in Clearwater, St Joe, and all these tiny towns we call home, these back roads and quiet places, even here.

What I have seen of ICE, with my own eyes--the violence and brutality, the terrorism--is unconscionable.

But I am so proud to be a Minnesotan. What I have seen of us let's me know that we are unbreakable. We are courageous and funny and smart. We are organized. We care about each other. Our humanity is intact and vital.

We keep us safe.

12/09/2025

Grandpa Red and the Cherokee Rose by H. H. Madsen is out February 24th, but it's up on our website now for holiday gifts! 🤫

11/11/2025

So well deserved! Congratulations Candace!

10/30/2025

It's here!

Discover "Montana Matrimonial News" by Spur Award-winning author Candace Simar. Dive into intertwined stories of Dakota homesteaders searching for love and battling frontier loneliness. Join us for the book launch at Brainerd Library on November 7. Learn more about life, struggles, and hope on the p...

06/29/2025

This little publishing house just took home two gold medals from the Midwest Book Awards! Congratulations to for Sister Lumberjack and for Mirage of Destiny! Two very deserving books by two wonderful authors.

04/05/2024

We love a little more bling on our shelf!

🎉 Congratulations to the 2024 finalists of the in the Animal & Pet category! 🎉

⭐️ Brooklyn Goes Home: The Rise and Fall of American Greyhound Racing and the Dog that Inspired a Movement by Christine A. Dorchak and Carey M. Theil, Lantern Publishing & Media

️⭐️ The Canyon Wren: Stories of My Horses: Volume III by Martín Prechtel, North Star Press of St. Cloud

⭐️ Romeo the Friendly Wolf: A True Alaska Tale, by Nick Jans

04/05/2024

04/04/2022

This gem from Martín Prechtel comes out TOMORROW! If you've already ordered--THANK YOU! Tiny, good businesses exist because of real relationships, trust, and a bit of effort. We see you, and we appreciate you more than we can say! Please take a moment to review The Wild Rose on Amazon, request it at your local library and indie bookstores, share it on your pages, send it on to a reviewer you know, give it to a friend--all of it, every little bit is huge to us! ❤️🐎

“Carrying on from The Mare and the Mouse, this series, The Stories of My Horses, is not just a compendium of imaginative romantic narratives written to casually entertain the horse loving public.

As romantically remembered as they might seem to be, they are actually straightforward historical accounts of what happens when a life-loving fool like me, a native of that beautiful land-locked, cultural island called Northern New Mexico, who in the latter half of the 20th century, decides he must live his everyday life in direct defiance of the soul-shrinking threat of modernity’s earth-wrecking ugliness and mediocre existence, by keeping some modicum of the bright shine and outrageous living passion of our real souls alive by flying free and beautiful on the backs of flesh and blood horses over a live unpeopled, unmanicured land…

I’ll admit I’m a romantic and heroic. But to be honest, it’s not my fault: it’s the fault of all the horses I’ve ever known. For horses since forever, real horses I mean, have always been romantic, noble and heroic by definition of their very existence, and to be with them well, you too have to develop a soul that corresponds!

In my romantic struggle for beauty in an unromantic mechanical age, my horses, simply by how they were, and how we looked, and how we were together, although no more than a tiny broadside against the ghost ship of mediocrity of this crazy age was some kind of victory just by the fact that we still existed. Horses inspire courage against hopeless odds just by their courage and beauty.”

–from the Introduction to The Wild Rose

Available on our website and wherever books are sold.

03/02/2022

Oooooo, look what just came back from the printer! Have you preordered yet? Available straight from us, link in bio, straight from Martín www.floweringmountain.com, or anywhere books are sold.

It's a real good one, y'all.

11/11/2021

For Veteran's Day.

"Reading Jerry Hansen's poems in The Kontum Madonna is like standing in front of the black granite Viet Nam memorial in Washington, D.C., and reading the names of the men and women who died in the war. Hansen names and mourns his comrades, but the difference is that his poems also make us see the Vietnamese people, both soldiers and civilians, men, women, and children, who died in that almost-forgotten war. But Hansen was there, and he can't forget the awful realization of kinship: with the little boys, blown wide open on their way to school, or the old farmer whose animals and crops and seeds he and other Minnesota farm boys destroyed, or The Kontum Madonna, "a woman and her child soldered together" in a bombed-out field.

In these poems Hansen refuses to take comfort in the familiar cliches we use--Myths and Illusions, he calls them--to make war less terrible than it is. He has dedicated this collection to his friend Pappy, who died in Vietnam. But he resists making his friend's death heroic or his poem a patriotic eulogy. He writes instead:

If I let them say
that you were brave,
​that what we did was good,
they will use
their memory of you
to kill again and again.

These poems are stark, the rhythms jagged, almost like the line drawings by Dick Adair that accompany them. The images are unsparing and unforgettable: the dead, wrapped in ponchos, and lying side by side "like giant cucumbers/ in a great garden," or little boys, "spread thin, like strawberry jam/ onto a slice of Asian meadow."

The Vietnam war takes up a page, if that, in most U.S. history textbooks. But Hansen's poems refuse the comfort of forgetting or the illusion of a return to innocence. If we look carefully between the lines and among the images, we, as readers, may see our own faces among the dead, as we do when we stand in front of that polished black wall in Washington.

I highly recommend The Kontum Madonna for its courage and harsh beauty, its compassion, and its unflinching resistance to war--all war."

-Mara Faulkner, OSB
Professor Emerita of English, College of St. Benedict/St. John's University Author of Going Blind: A Memoir and Still Birth, a poetry chapbook.

07/02/2021

Congratulations to Michael Prelee for winning first place at the in the Mystery/Thriller category!

Available on our website and wherever books are sold.