Four Pines Bookstore to host Byron Graves for Medicine Wheels talk

Four Pines Bookstore hosted Byron Graves for a 5 p.m. book talk Saturday, June 20, at 102 Third St. NW, putting one of downtown Bemidji’s best-known independent businesses at the center of a conversation about Indigenous storytelling, youth fiction, and community life.

The event came during Four Pines’ week-long fifth anniversary celebration, which ran from Saturday, June 13, through Saturday, June 20, at the same downtown location. The bookstore has described itself as Bemidji’s local independent bookstore since 2021 and as the first bookstore on the Mississippi River, a claim that underscores how much weight a shop like this carries in a smaller city.

Its downtown setting adds to that role. Four Pines sits across from the Paul and Babe statue, under the Bemidji archway, and near restaurants, pubs, art galleries, retail stores, and theaters. That location has made the store more than a place to buy books. It functions as a gathering point in a part of the city where foot traffic, arts programming, and local identity overlap.

Graves brought a distinctly regional and cultural dimension to the visit. Graves is Ojibwe and Lakota and was born and raised on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, where they played high school basketball. Their debut novel was Rez Ball, and Medicine Wheels is their second book. HarperCollins describes Medicine Wheels as a young adult sports story rooted in Native culture, following a gifted young Ojibwe athlete learning to ride in his father’s footsteps while preparing for a skateboarding championship.

The publisher also identifies major themes in the book as sports, death, grief, and bereavement. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center lists Medicine Wheels at 337 pages for readers ages 13 and older, with a June 2, 2026 publication date. That combination makes the book especially relevant to teen readers and to adults interested in how Native stories are being told in contemporary fiction.

Graves has already built a national profile, with honors including the William C. Morris Award and the American Indian Youth Literature Award. In Bemidji, that pedigree matters because the city sits between the Leech Lake, Red Lake, and White Earth reservations, giving an Indigenous author event a local resonance that reaches beyond a standard bookstore appearance.

For downtown Bemidji, the Graves talk fit a larger pattern: independent bookstores helping shape civic identity through events that draw readers in for more than retail. At Four Pines, the book talk joined anniversary programming, local foot traffic, and a broader public conversation about who gets to tell northern Minnesota’s stories.