ERIKA BOLSTAD

Storytelling is looking someone in the eye and making a human connection. And then another, and another. And another. It is the best way I know to feel a little less alone in this world, and I strive as a journalist and human to build more of those connections. 

I spent most of my career as a reporter on the East Coast, but my heart has always been in the West. In 2017, I returned to my home state of Oregon, after my father was diagnosed with dementia. I now live in Portland, Ore., with my husband and our dog, Mojie, in a 126-year-old foursquare house with a bright pink door.

I'm the author of Windfall, a narrative nonfiction book published in 2023 by Sourcebooks. Windfall was a 2024 finalist for the Oregon Book Awards. Set on the prairies of North Dakota. Windfall begins with a mysterious email that arrives from my mother shortly before her death, saying she'd inherited mineral rights. I set out at the height of the oil boom to unearth the story behind the bequest, in search of the source of the whispers heard on the Great Plains: We could be rich.

Currently, I’m directing Monumental, a feature-length documentary about one American city’s reckoning with its monuments to westward expansion. Production on the film will continue into 2027.

A little more about me….

I report from the West for Stateline, and before that, wrote about climate change adaptation in the United States for E&E’s Climatewire. In that job I traveled the country covering the intersection of politics, science, business and culture, with an emphasis on how people across America are coping with climate change in their neighborhoods. 

Before that, I was a reporter in the McClatchy Washington Bureau, where I wrote about environmental issues and served as the Washington correspondent for the Miami Herald. I also spent four years in the bureau covering Washington for the Anchorage Daily News and the Idaho Statesman. My work on the Larry Craig scandal for the Statesman was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news.

At the Miami Herald, I covered politics, the state legislature, local government and hurricanes — including Hurricane Katrina from New Orleans. I got my start as a journalist at the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., and The Item in Sumter, S.C.

In March 2020, I completed a master’s degree in multimedia journalism at the University of Oregon. In 2022, I was the recipient of an environmental arts grant from the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation. The grant supported a companion short documentary to Windfall. The film, To Be Rich, was a selection in 2023 and 2024 of the San Francisco Green Film Festival, the Wild & Scenic Film Festival, the McMinnville Short Film Festival, and the Catalyst Film Collective’s RISE community film showcase.

In 2026, I released a short film, The Elk, a 30-min. standalone spinoff of the Monumental documentary project. The Elk is an official selection of the Austin Film Festival, the Portland Panorama Film Festival, the Wild Rivers Festival, the Ames Documentary Film Festival and the Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation and Technology, where it was awarded Best Documentary Short.