Author: Erika Bolstad

Erika Bolstad is a journalist whose reporting focuses on climate, energy, and the American West. Windfall combines that expertise with an investigation into her own family. The book begins with Anna, Bolstad’s great-grandmother, a North Dakota homesteader who was confined to an institution and left few personal records. Generations later, the family learns that it still controls mineral rights beneath Anna’s land just as oil development is transforming the region. Sourcebooks issued Windfall in 2023 under the subtitle The Prairie Woman Who Lost Her Way and the Great-Granddaughter Who Found Her. Bolstad follows archival clues, family memories, and the economics of extraction while confronting the possibility that fossil-fuel wealth could benefit a family shaped by loss. The result is memoir, environmental reporting, and regional history at once. Windfall asks what inheritance means when land carries both emotional history and commercial value, and it restores attention to a woman whose own account did not survive.