Trent Preszler Books in Order

Trent Preszler is a South Dakota native who grew up on a cattle ranch near Faith and went to a one-room schoolhouse in the Standing Rock area. The place was practical, wide open, and tied to weather, animals, and work. That background stayed with him, and it helps explain why his writing pays such close attention to tools, land, and the way family history can live inside ordinary objects.

School took him a long way from that ranch. He graduated from Iowa State University in 1998, then studied in the United Kingdom on a Rotary scholarship and earned a postgraduate diploma from the University of Edinburgh. His first job after college was a White House internship during the Clinton administration. Later, he returned to Cornell University, where he earned an MS in agricultural economics and a PhD in horticulture.

For a long time, writing was not the center of his working life. He spent two decades in the wine business, including years leading Bedell Cellars on Long Island, and he also became a wooden boatbuilder. Those experiences show up all over his work. He notices how things are made, how landscapes shape people, and how slow, repetitive labor can become its own way of thinking.

Then came the project that changed the course of things.

After his father died, Preszler inherited a beat-up toolbox and decided to build a wooden canoe with it, even though he had no formal training in woodcraft. What started as a private act of grief became something larger. A documentary about his life as a winemaker and boatbuilder won a New York Emmy Award, and that attention helped bring his story to a wider audience. Soon after, he was encouraged to turn the experience, and the long family history behind it, into a book.

That book was Little and Often. Published in 2021, the memoir follows Preszler back to South Dakota, into the silence that had grown between him and his father, and into the shop where he teaches himself to use inherited tools. Readers often respond to how grounded it feels, and it was also named a USA Today Best Book of the Year. It is a book about grief and estrangement, but also about making something with your own hands, about self-respect, and about the possibility of forgiveness after years of hurt. It also shows the gap between the man he thought his father was and the more complicated person he comes to understand.

Part of what gives Little and Often its force is Preszler's honesty about not fitting easily into the rough cowboy culture of his childhood. In interviews about the book, he has spoken about struggling with self-worth and sexuality while growing up in western South Dakota. That tension, between the life he came from and the life he made for himself, runs through much of his writing. So does the pull between South Dakota and New York, between leaving home and trying to understand it.

He tends to return to the same big questions.

What do we inherit from family, place, and work? How do craft and attention change grief? And what does it mean to make a life at the meeting point of commerce, nature, and memory? His second book, Evergreen, takes those questions in a different direction. Instead of memoir, it looks at the role evergreen trees have played in American life, from forests and sawmills to Christmas tree farms, and asks what our uses of trees say about the country itself. His recent work moves easily from the intensely personal to the sweep of environmental history.

These days, Preszler teaches at Cornell University, where he works with students on environmental and economic questions and helps lead programs tied to leadership and planetary solutions. He has also been involved in reforestation work through One Tree Planted. Whether he is writing about a canoe, a ranch childhood, or the history of evergreens, he keeps returning to one plain idea: meaningful change is usually built the slow way, little by little.