Author Talk with William Kent Krueger

Join us in welcoming regional beloved author William Kent Krueger to read from and discuss his 20th installment of the Cork O’Connor mysteries, Spirit Crossing! Book signing to follow.

When Cork’s grandson stumbles across the grave of a murdered Ojibwe woman, the men responsible for the crime put the little boy in the crosshairs of their gun sights.

Born to a family of nomads at heart, William Kent Krueger (he goes by Kent) lived in ten different houses in eight different cities in six different states before graduating from high school. He briefly attended Stanford University but was forced to leave as result of his radical activities protesting the Vietnam War. After that, he logged timber, worked construction, tried his hand at free-lance journalism, and eventually ended up researching child development at the University of Minnesota. He makes his home in St. Paul, a city he dearly loves.

As far back as he can remember, Kent was writing stories. But he served a long apprenticeship. His first novel wasn’t published until he was forty-eight years old. He writes the New York Times bestselling Cork O’Connor mystery series, which is set in the north woods of Minnesota. His protagonist, Corcoran O’Connor, is the former sheriff of the fictional Tamarack County, and also a man of mixed heritage—part Irish-American and part Ojibwe. His work has received a number of awards, including the Edgar Award, the Anthony Award, the Barry Award, the Minnesota Book Award, the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, and the Friends of American Writers Prize.  He does all his writing in a couple of wonderfully funky St. Paul coffee shops.

     This Tender Land, the companion novel to his Edgar Award-winning Ordinary Grace, spent six months among the top ten on the New York Times bestseller list. His stand-alone mystery novel The River We Remember, released in September 2023, has been on many best-book-of-the-year lists.

Kent credits his love of stories and his success as a writer to his parents, who read to him as a child and fostered in his young heart an appreciation for the power of the written word.

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