Next week, from July 8-11, join UNP authors Jacob K. Friefeld and Pamela Smith Hill for LauraPalooza, hosted by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy & Research Association!

LauraPalooza is the premier academic and fan conference dedicated to exploring the profound literary, historical, and cultural contributions of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and their family. This year’s conference will be held at the Holiday Inn City Centre in Sioux Falls, SD.

Check out our authors’s events below!

Jacob K. Friefeld is a historian at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. He is coauthor of Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History (Nebraska, 2017) and coauthor of The First Migrants (Bison Books, 2023).

The First Migrants recounts the largely unknown story of Black people who migrated from the South to the Great Plains between 1877 and 1920 in search of land and freedom. They exercised their rights under the Homestead Act to gain title to 650,000 acres, settling in all of the Great Plains states.

Pamela Smith Hill is a New York Times best-selling editor, author, educator, and expert on Laura Ingalls Wilder. She has taught young adult literature and creative and professional writing at universities in Washington, Oregon, and Colorado, as well as classes on Laura Ingalls Wilder through Missouri State University. Hill has been interviewed for multiple documentaries on Wilder and has appeared on C-SPAN, NPR, PBS, and the BBC for her expertise. As well as three novels for young adults, her books include Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography and Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life. She is also the author of Too Good to Be Altogether Lost (Nebraska, 2025).

In Too Good to Be Altogether Lost, Wilder expert Pamela Smith Hill dives back into the Little House books, closely examining Wilder’s text, her characters, and their stories. Hill reveals that these gritty, emotionally complex novels depict a realistic coming of age for a girl in the American West.