Event Information

Tickets on sale NOW! General Admission

Laureate's Feast, honoring Joe Jackson, author of "Black Elk: the Life of an American Visionary," benefiting the John Neihardt Foundation

About this event

Join us at this elegant new location for a night you won't forget, benefitting the John G. Neihardt Foundation!

Delicious hor'dourves, drinks, and music, along with a silent auction begin the night. Follow that with a meal, a talk by Joe Jackson (this year's Word Sender honoree) and a live auction!

Meal includes harvest salad, choice of prime rib or chicken piccata, loaded potatoes, spring veggies, dessert. Cash bar, with one free drink ticket provided with each ticket, and two bottles of wine at each table.

"Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary": Winner of the PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; Winner of the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Award, Best Biography of 2016; True West Magazine Winner of the Western Writers of America 2017 Spur Award; Best Western Biography Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography; One of the Best Books of 2016, The Boston Globe

"An astonishingly rich saga . . . Jackson's biography works to represent 'the flesh-and-blood wicasa wakan' (holy man) . . . We see Black Elk balancing tradition and modernity, with fleeting but vivid scenes of him on a ferris-wheel and in a movie house. We hear of struggles within subsequent generations over his legacy and Lakota identity more generally. Jackson succeeds in interweaving the secular and the spiritual to the point that the non-native reader can experience Harney Peak in the Black Hills . . . as what [Black Elk] knew it to be: the centre of the world." ―Christine Bold, The Times Literary Supplement