Performance
Location: Room 186 | Bruce Roseland
Biography: Bruce Roseland is the 8 th Poet Laureate of South Dakota. Roseland calls himself a prairie poet. His poetry describes people, work and nature in modern rural life. Roseland’s poems often reveal the sacred in relationships between the land, the life it supports and those who are its stewards. His recent work describes the need to conserve native grasslands. Roseland is a fourth-generation cattleman who grew up on a ranch near Seneca, in north central South Dakota. He is the author of eight books of free verse poetry and has won four national awards, including the 2007 Wrangler Award for Excellence in Western Literature; Media for The Last Buffalo (2006). Roseland has won the Will Rogers Medallion for Excellence in Western/Cowboy Poetry three times: 2009, for A Prairie Prayer (2008); 2019, for Cowman (2018); and 2022, for Heart of the Prairie (2021). Roseland received a M.A. in Sociology from the University of North Dakota in 1980. He is President Emeritus of SD State Poetry Society and a SD Humanities Scholar. Roseland still works his family ranch outside of Seneca, South Dakota. He enjoys spending time in his Black Hills Spearfish home when cows and crops permit. Earl’s Own Dakota Odyssey (2024), Roseland’s first free verse story, or epic poem, is now available on Amazon.