St. Cloud State University professor Christopher Lehman and alumna Cathy Coats ’13 ’17 have both been named finalists for the 2025 Minnesota Book Awards.
They are two of the four finalists for the Emilie Buchwald Award for Minnesota Nonfiction. Lehman previously won the 2020 Minnesota Book Award for Minnesota Nonfiction for his 2019 book “Slavery’s Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State.”
Lehman’s seventh published book, “It Took Courage: Eliza Winston’s Quest for Freedom,” follows the story of Eliza Winston, an enslaved woman from Mississippi who had her freedom granted by a Minnesota judge in 1860.
“When I first studied Eliza Winston’s life, I was struck by how so many sources about her actually said very little about her own involvement in her struggle for freedom from slavery in Minnesota,” Lehman said. “Sources tended instead to focus on the abolitionists in Minnesota who assisted her. I wanted to write about her in a way that made her the focus of her own story.”
Coats first book, “To Banish Forever: A Secret Society, the Ho-Chunk, and Ethnic Cleansing in Minnesota,” details a secret society of Mankato men named Knights of the Forest in 1863 that worked to remove the Ho-Chunk people from their reservation as part of the ethnic cleansing of southern Minnesota.
Coats is a metadata specialist at the University of Minnesota Libraries and previously worked as a library technician in SCSU’s James W. Miller Learning Resources Center. She earned her master’s degree from SCSU, with her master thesis researching the removal of the Ho-Chunk.
Winners will be announced at the 37th annual Minnesota Book Awards Ceremony on April 22 at the Ordway Center for Performing Arts in St. Paul.
