“There is a highway language in South Dakota, but you have to be looking for it.”
- Christopher Vondracek
coming soon
Clark Stories
Robert A. Christenson
A candid and witty documentation of small-town life in the Midwest during the late 1960s.
Country Day Adventures
Tara Barney
Country Day Adventures is a children's story and activity book for preschools, daycares, and school-aged children up to second grade.
Follow the main character, Tara, as she spends a day exploring and creating in a rural setting in the Midwest of the United States. Trace the old farmhouse where Tara lives, make a shadow drawing, and meet Tara's pets. Children will learn to build a blanket fort, make a snack, create a mosaic art project and a paper plate craft. You can create a lesson plan from this book for an educational environment or the book can be used at home for a weekend's activities.
Rattlesnake Summer: 66 Poems for 66 South Dakota Counties
A collection of poetry from Christopher Vondracek
In his new collection, Rattlesnake Summer, poet and journalist Christopher Vondracek takes his readers on a unique tour of South Dakota via sixty-six original poems – one for each county in the state.
Inspired by his time as a South Dakota journalist and completed while living a thousand miles away in the nation’s capital, Vondracek's latest collection is an unconventional and loving stroll through the varied, and sometimes strange, seasons of his adopted home state.
“don’t antagonize the buffalo.”
Charles Badger Clark, Jr.
Traveler, Lecturer, and Poet
Brought to the plains of Dakota Territory at just three months old, Charles Badger Clark, Jr. grew up the son of a Methodist minister and women's suffrage advocate in Deadwood, South Dakota.
As a young man, Badger left school at Dakota Wesleyan University and journeyed to Cuba with a group of South Dakotans set on colonizing the land. He lived a rather nomadic lifestyle for two years until tuberculosis forced him off the island and back home to the plains.
Shortly after returning home, Badger was sent by his doctors to the dry deserts of the Southwest hoping to cure his disease. It was in Arizona that Badger bonded with neighboring cowpunchers over cattle roundups and stories that, following his four-year stint as an Arizona cowboy, Badger brought home to publish in his first collection, Sun and Saddle Leather.
Badger's verse paints a vivid picture of the Western lifestyle through the lives and stories of cowboys hard at work on the ranch. It was this work that dubbed Badger South Dakota's first Poet Laureate in 1937 and lead him to become a sought-after lecturer, traveling across the nation to speak and read his poetry.
Badger lived out the rest of his life and literary career in Custer State Park in a cabin he named the Badger Hole. Now a historic landmark open for the summer season, the Badger Hole features the cowboy poet's life just as he left it in 1957.
HISTORY OF THE BADGER CLARK POETRY FOUNDATION
Badger Clark Poetry Club
Since December of 1996, the third Wednesday of every month has marked another night of poetry reading and great company for members of the Badger Clark Poetry Club. Folks read from, sign, and date the club's copy of Sun and Saddle Leather, leaving its pages lined with hundreds of names from those who have come and gone over the years. Open to anyone and everyone, members of the club celebrate the work of Badger Clark and other literary artists.
Badger Clark Foundation
The Badger Clark Foundation is a nonprofit organization that works to publicize the cowboy poet and foster literary work in South Dakota. Each year, the foundation hosts Badgerstock, a celebration dedicated to the life and work of Badger Clark. The social gathering invites artists, writers, musicians, and bands from across the state to perform and share their works, and funds raised go to various programs dedicated to the arts.
Badger Clark Publishing Company
The Badger Clark Publishing Company works to nurture literary art coming from South Dakota and serves as a local source for folks interested in publishing, promoting, and selling their work.
