For Immediate Release

Contact: Chris Cauble, Publisher, Riverbend Publishing

406-449-0200, ccauble@riverbendpublishing.com

Author of local memoir establishes writing scholarship at MSU-Northern

Nedra Sterry, a native of Hingham and the author of the popular memoir “When the Meadowlark Sings,” has established a creative writing scholarship for students of MSU-Northern in Havre.

Tom Reynolds, executive director of the MSU-Northern Foundation, called the gift “a considerable donation to the future students of MSU-Northern.”

The annual $500 award for fiction or creative non-fiction will be sustained by an initial cash grant sufficient to fund the “Nedra Sterry Meadowlark Award” until 2028. In addition, Sterry is assigning all future profits from sales of the book and a forthcoming audio book to the MSU-Northern Foundation. The first award will be given in the spring of 2007.

Sterry did not attend MSU-Northern but her husband, Alton, and two sons, Rick and Craig, obtained teaching credentials there. Sterry currently lives in Eugene, Oregon. Her sons Alan and Craig manage the family farm near Hingham.

Sterry began writing about her life on Montana’s prairies after Alton died in 1997. The resulting story, “When the Meadowlark Sings: The Story of a Montana Family,” was published by Riverbend Publishing of Helena in 2003.

Riverbend publisher Chris Cauble said the book is a regional bestseller and has been reprinted four times. An audio version, read by the author, is scheduled for release next year.

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The book traces Sterry’s family through the homesteading boom, the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar advancements brought by rural electrification. It has garnered high praise from such prize-winning authors as David McCumber (“The Cowboy Way: Seasons of a Montana Ranch”) and Cai Emmons (“His Mother’s Son”). McCumber said Sterry’s book “should take its place among the very best Montana memoirs.”

Born in 1918 in Fort Benton, Montana, the daughter of hailed-out homesteaders, Sterry grew up in a succession of isolated one-room schools in northern and central Montana, where her mother, a teacher, eked out a living.

Clear-eyed and decidedly unsentimental, Sterry does not gloss over the toll disease and poverty took on her family. Despite—or perhaps because of—the hardships of her childhood, Sterry learned young to take pleasure where she found it and her book is graced with memories of porcupine hunts, Saturday night dances, well-told stories, and the meadowlark’s song.

The 232-page book is available for $12.95 in bookstores across Montana and directly from the publisher by calling toll-free 1-866-787-2363.

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