Nancy Tystad Koupal

Nancy Tystad Koupal

Nancy Tystad Koupal, is director and editor-in-chief of the Pioneer Girl Project. She is well known and admired by researchers, writers, and readers who recognize her work to advance history as a vital part of our culture. With an M.A. degree in English, Nancy began working for the South Dakota State Historical Society in 1979 as editor of the quarterly journal, South Dakota History and South Dakota Historical Collections. In 1997, with the help of Society director and the South Dakota Historical Society Foundation, Nancy founded the South Dakota Historical Society Press, grounding it in the standards and practices of academic publishing and in production values comparable to national presses.

During Nancy's tenure as an editor of the Press, the critical and financial success of publishing Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, led to the Pioneer Girl Project, a study of Wilder’s early writing. In 2009, Nancy was inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame. Nancy retired in 2020, as director and publisher of the Historical Society Press, and is devoted to completing the Pioneer Girl Project books and she also works with the Press’s highly successful children’s books. Beyond being a seasoned editor, Nancy is a distinguished researcher and writer in her own right. She has become one of the nation’s leading scholars on the career of L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz. She compiled and annotated the satirical columns Baum wrote as a newspaper editor in Aberdeen in her book Our Landlady and contributed to and edited Baum’s Road to Oz: The Dakota Years. Nancy is also an authority on the history of woman suffrage in South Dakota and has published articles in Montana, the Magazine of Western History, Great Plains Quarterly, and South Dakota History in addition to contributing to the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains and Encyclopedia of State and Local Women’s History. In 2002, she participated in a symposium on “Women of the West” at the White House.