For more than two decades, the South Dakota Festival of Books has been the state's premier literary gathering, a weekend-long occasion when nationally known writers and homegrown ones share stages with readers who, in many parts of the state, live far from any large bookstore. This year it will be something it has never been before: a single day.
The 24th South Dakota Festival of Books is set for Saturday, Oct. 3, 2026, at the Holiday Inn City Centre, 100 W. 8th St. in downtown Sioux Falls. It is free and open to the public. Where past festivals featured 60 to 70 authors spread across a weekend, this one will bring together about 30, with programming centered at the hotel and at Siouxland Libraries.
The reason for the contraction is not a lack of interest. It is money. On April 2, 2025, the National Endowment for the Humanities, acting under the direction of the administration's Department of Government Efficiency, abruptly terminated all federal funding for state humanities councils. The South Dakota Humanities Council, the nonprofit that stages the festival, was among the councils left to decide what could survive.
"We kind of had to sit down and ask ourselves, 'What are the humanities?'" Joshua Rudnik, director of the council's Center for the Book, told South Dakota News Watch. "The humanities are well defined, but I don't think people are aware of what the humanities are, that they touch our lives every day."
The council itself is not a newcomer to lean times. It was founded in 1972, the year it began as a state humanities council in response to an act of Congress. It is, by its own description, the only cultural organization in the state whose sole mission is to deliver humanities programming to the people of South Dakota. Its programs, including the festival, have long been offered free of charge.
The festival began in 2003 in Deadwood, and in the years since it has moved around the state, deliberately alternating between the eastern and western sides. Last year's 23rd edition was held in Spearfish and ran from Friday to Sunday. Olympic gold medalist Billy Mills addressed hundreds of third graders there, and adults heard from writers including Rebecca Clarren, Michael Grunwald, Eloisa James and Chris La Tray. Attendees that year described the festival in terms that read like a mission statement: the only event of its kind in South Dakota, a rare chance to meet authors from beyond the region, and, for one reader, "the inspiration and the civil dialogue" that felt necessary "at this particular moment in history."
This year's move to Sioux Falls is, in part, an attempt to reach more people. Rudnik said he hopes holding the event in the state's largest city will spread awareness of the festival and expose the organization to a broader audience. The trade-off is the shortened schedule. "Having fewer authors, it's really more about the impact that these authors make on the general public," Rudnik said.
At the center of this year's program is Matthew Davis, whose "A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore" was selected as the 2026 One Book South Dakota. The One Book program, created by the council in 2003, encourages readers across the state to read and discuss the same book over the course of a year. The 2026 theme is "One Book, Many Stories."
Davis grew up in Chicago and now lives in London with his wife and children. He holds a master's degree in nonfiction writing and another in international relations and international economics. He was living in Washington, D.C., when he began traveling to the Black Hills to research the book, drawn by what he called the region's "wonderful sense of history."
The book's origin is unusual. Davis said he wanted to write it after reading about President Donald Trump's speech at Mount Rushmore National Memorial on July 3, 2020, in which Trump spoke about American history, manifest destiny, and the monuments built to commemorate it. "I began to wonder why he gave that speech at Mount Rushmore," Davis said. "What was it about the four faces and the sculpture itself that both literally and figuratively framed his speech?"
What began as a history project became something more layered as the country changed around him. "I just found that it really represented so many of our different national myths, contradictions, conflicts," he said. "So in that way, it represented American history."
Davis has said the subject kept refusing to stay in the past. When Trump was reelected in 2024, many of the themes from that 2020 speech "came to inhabit the present" again. "He began to sort of value and talk about the idea of manifest destiny, this interpretation of history that has impacted current institutions like the Smithsonian, or like national parks, or like humanities councils, for that matter," Davis said. "All that stuff is not passed. It's very much in the present day."
As part of the One Book program, Davis went on a seven-stop speaking tour around South Dakota. Rudnik, who is from west of the Missouri River, traveled with him and said it was striking to hear how differently people in different parts of the state talk about the memorial. "People recognize that it is a complicated history and that history is a part of what makes that memorial what it is today," Rudnik said.
The festival's lineup reflects a similar range. Among the featured authors are Ann Bausum, whose "White Lies" examines how the South lost the Civil War and rewrote its history; Joseph Bottum, with "This Far Country," a South Dakota volume marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, illustrated by Jeanne Bowman; Patrick Hicks, reading from his travelogue "Greater Minnesota"; Paul Horsted, with "South Dakota: Yesterday & Today"; Jon K. Lauck and Dr. Harry Thompson on the Missouri River; Tracy Hauff and Richard Zauft on "Pté Oyate – Buffalo Nation"; Marcella Remund; and duncan barlow. South Dakota Poet Laureate Bruce Roseland and former Poet Laureate Lee Ann Roripaugh are also scheduled to attend, and national author Jeffrey Rosen, who published "The Pursuit of Happiness" and "The Pursuit of Liberty" this year, will deliver the keynote.
The day's offerings extend beyond panels and signings. There is a South Dakota Book Fair, described by organizers as the nostalgia of a Scholastic Book Fair reimagined for adults, with vendors selling books, magazines, journals, stationery and other literary finds. There is a guided SculptureWalk Sioux Falls tour through downtown, led by SculptureWalk and council board member Jim Mathis, connecting the city's public art to the storytelling traditions that have long animated the festival. There are workshops and craft talks aimed at aspiring writers, and an educator's panel on Indigenous voices and English language arts curriculum.
That mix is the point. The festival has always been, in the council's framing, about connecting the best regional and national writers with the state's readers for conversations, presentations, panel discussions and book signings. The scaled-back version keeps that purpose even as it sheds a day.
Whether the one-day format becomes the new normal is an open question. The council has framed the 24th festival as a chance to honor its legacy while embracing "new ideas, new voices, and new experiences." But the funding picture that forced the change remains unsettled, and the festival's fate is tied to it. For now, on a single Saturday in October, the state's literary community will gather in downtown Sioux Falls, browse a book fair built for grown-ups, walk past sculptures that tell stories in three dimensions, and listen to an author explain why a mountain in the Black Hills means so many different things to so many different people.
It is, in its way, an answer to the question Rudnik posed when the cuts first landed. The humanities, he suggested, are not an abstraction. They are the thing that happens when people who disagree about what a place means sit in the same room and talk about it.