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Book Award Finalists Announced Related Event: High Plains BookFest ( 10/02/2009 )
2009 High Plains Book Award Committee Announces Finalists
Thirteen books have been selected as finalists for the 2009 Parmly Billings Library High Plains Book Awards. All of the books were published for the first time in 2008 and written by a regional author or writing team, or is a literary work which examines and reflects life on the High Plains. Nominations were received from 20 publishers and several individuals in the U.S. and Canada.
The finalists have been selected in five categories: Best Novel; Best Nonfiction; Best First Book and the Zonta Best Woman Writer. A new award has been added this year honoring the Best Poetry. A five hundred dollar cash prize is awarded in each category. The finalists are:
Fiction
Kyleah's Tree, Janet Muirhead Hill, Raven Publishing; So Brave, Young, and Handsome,
Leif Enger, Grove/Atlantic; Another Man's Moccasins, Craig Johnson, Viking/Penguin
Nonfiction
In Contemporary Rhythm, Peter H. Hassrick and Elizabeth J. Cunningham, University of Oklahoma Press; The Wide Open, Ed. by Annick Smith/Susan O'Connor, University of Nebraska Press; Legacy of Stone, Margaret Hryniuk, Frank Korvemaker and Larry Easton, Coteau Books
Poetry
Made Flesh, Craig Arnold, Ausable Press; Prairie Kaddish, Isa Milman, Coteau Books;
The Baseball Field at Night, Patricia Goedicke, Lost Horse Press
First Book
Horses That Buck, Margot Kahn, University of Oklahoma Press; Sherlock Holmes: The Montana Chronicles, John Fitzpatrick, Riverbend Publishing; Wind River Country, Bayard Fox and Claude Poulet, Fremont County Publishing
Zonta Best Woman Writer
The Wide Open, Edited by Annick Smith and Susan O'Connor, University of Nebraska Press; Road Map to Holland, Jennifer Graf Groneberg, New American Library/Penguin; Horses That Buck, Margot Kahn, University of Oklahoma Press.
All nominated books written, edited, or co-written or co-edited by women writers were considered for the Best Woman Writer Award sponsored by the Zonta Club of Billings.
The Parmly Billings Library Board established the High Plains Book Awards to recognize regional authors and/or literary works which examine and reflect life on the High Plains including the states of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, and Kansas, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.
More than 40 local volunteer read and evaluated the books, each book was then ranked by three of the readers. The top three books in each category will be sent to regional judges for final selection as award winners. Judges are published authors in the various genres with strong ties to the High Plains region.
“We are hoping bookstores and libraries will publicize the nominees and finalists so the public will have an opportunity to read this interesting array of books,” said Parmly Billings Library Director Bill Cochran.
Winners in each category will be announced at the The High Plains Book Awards Banquet on Friday, October 2, 2009 in Billings, MT. The event is the kickoff for the 7th annual High Plains BookFest. For more information go to: http://highplainsbookawards.org/
2009 High Plains Book Award Finalists
Fiction
Kyleah’s Tree, Janet Muirhead Hill, Raven Publishing
Founder of Raven Publishing Inc., Hill was born and raised in Colorado and attended Montana State University where she majored in English. She is currently an author of children’s literature and teaches the “True Fiction” novel writing-workshop.
“Wishing on the sunrise from her treetop refuge, eleven-year-old Kyleah Ralston seeks magic to right all that is wrong in her life. Her twin brother is lost to her, and she believes that her father abandoned her because she isn't pretty enough. To add to her woes, her foster family doesn't understand her. When she is banned from climbing her favorite tree, she agrees to join Benjamin, her older foster-brother in his scheme to run away. Kyleah and Benjamin encounter many narrow escapes and breath-taking adventures on their journey from rural south-east Kansas to Moose Jaw, Canada. Through it all, Kyleah learns self-acceptance and the true meaning of home and family that has more to do with love than bloodlines.” – Raven Publishing.
So Brave, Young, and Handsome, Leif Enger, Grove/Atlantic
Leif Enger grew up in Osakis, Minnesota. “So Brave, Young, and Handsome is successor to his best-selling novel Peace Like a River. “Enger's new novel is set in the West in 1915 and takes full advantage of the era's color. Rife with train robbers, cowboys, sharpshooters and Pinkerton detectives, it's a story about finding purpose and redemption in a land of shifting borders, where geography and modernism are finding form.” – Neda Ulaby, NPR Book Tour
Another Man's Moccasins, Craig Johnson, Viking/Penguin
Johnson is a Wyoming native and award-wining mystery writer best known for his Walt Longmire mystery series.
“When the body of a young Vietnamese woman is found alongside the interstate in Absaroka County, Wyoming, Sheriff Walt Longmire is determined to discover the identity of the victim and is forced to confront the horrible similarities of this murder to that of his first homicide investigation as a marine in Vietnam.”- Penguin Books
Non-fiction
In Contemporary Rhythm, Peter H. Hassrick and Elizabeth J. Cunningham, University of Oklahoma Press
Born in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, Ernest L. Blumenschein (1874-1960) is a Taos post-impressionist painter, but was also once a first-violin in the New York Symphony. He was not only talented in art but also in music. Today, his art is revered and kept in the best museums in the country.
“Celebrating the life and art of perhaps New Mexico's most accomplished painter, In Contemporary Rhythm: The Art of Ernest L. Blumenschein provides a comprehensive view of the artist's colorful and inventive works. One of the founders of the famed Taos Society of Artists, Blumenschein rocketed into the spotlight with his modernist approach to capturing the American West.” – Traditional Fine Arts Organization
The Wide Open, Ed. by Annick Smith/Susan O'Connor, University of Nebraska Press
“The Wide Open reveals how some of the most interesting and accomplished writers and photographers in the country have met that challenge and given the genius of the prairie a vision and a voice. Their stories are as diverse as the tellers, ranging from fiction by Barry Lopez, Richard Ford, and William Kittredge, to the childhood histories of Mary Clearman Blew and Judy Blunt and the nonfiction narratives of Jim Harrison, Gretel Ehrlich, and Rick Bass. There are works by Native American prairie dwellers such as M. L. Smoker and James Welch and the photographic interpretations of Lee Friedlander, Lois Conner, and Geoffrey James. Personal or poetic, journalistic or scientific, these works eloquently attest to the prairie’s abundance in all its human and natural variety, offering pictures as wide open and rich as the land they depict.” - The University of Nebraska Press
Legacy of Stone, Margaret Hryniuk, Frank Korvemaker and Larry Easton, Coteau Books
“In words and stunning colour pictures, this book tells the history and the current reality of over 50 fieldstone buildings in Saskatchewan. The book includes an introduction by Bernie Flaman, the provincial Heritage Architect, a historical overview, and profiles of several of Saskatchewan’s most prominent stonemasons. The balance of the book is made up of stories of the buildings ¬ farmhouses, homes in urban communities, places of worship, public buildings and ruins. Margaret Hryniuk uses her years of experience in journalism to present factual yet fascinating accounts of the buildings and what is known of the people who put them there.
Larry Easton’s spectacular photographs bring these beautiful stone buildings to life, and Frank Korvemaker examines the dimensions and differences of the fieldstone that inhabits the Saskatchewan landscape.” - Coteau Books
Poetry
Made Flesh, Craig Arnold, Ausable Press
Yale educated and versatile, Craig Arnold is an award-winning poet whose first book, Shells, won the 1998 Yale Younger Poets Award. He was also a professor at the University of Wyoming.
“This is the world of Made Flesh, the long-awaited second book by Craig Arnold, and a new mythology of what it means to be in the body. Marrying narrative precision to lyric ecstasy, the archaic to the avant-garde, these poems celebrate the fragility of our very selves and "the joy of self-forgetting, “the acts of surrender that loves asks of us.” - Ausable Press
Prairie Kaddish, Isa Milman, Coteau Books
Winner of the 2005 Canadian Jewish Book Award, Milman is an artist, poet and occupational therapist. She was born in 1949 in Germany in a Displaced Persons Camp. She now lives in Victoria, B.C.
Isa Milman uses historical and personal awakening, and archival sleuthing, to create a "kaddish" - a Jewish prayer of mourning and commemoration - for a prairie community that now exists only through remembrance. Prairie Kaddish begins with the author's serendipitous discovery of the Jewish graveyard at Lipton, Saskatchewan, a community whose existence she'd previously been unaware of. The incident triggers an exploration for information about these people, and what their lives must have been like, and the resulting work is one of honor and remembrance.
The Baseball Field at Night, Patricia Goedicke, Lost Horse Press
Former student of W.H. Auden and Robert Frost, longtime professor of poetry at the University of Montana, the late Patricia Geodicke wrote thirteen books the last was The Baseball Fields at night.
“Her final poems, spoken by someone regarding her own dying with a grim amazement, were cultivated by years of recognizing an enduring condition, the presence of death in motion or abeyance, the sound of suffering. Recognition, the poems say, is an action.” – Ron Slate, poet
First Book
Horses That Buck, Margot Kahn, University of Oklahoma Press
A Cleveland, Ohio native, Kahn received her MFA from Columbia University and has worked as a journalist, editor, speechwriter and arts administrator. She received the Ohio Library Association’s Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant in 2005.
Drawing on interviews with saddle-bronc rider "Cody" Bill Smith and his family and friends, Margot Kahn recreates the days in the late 1960s and early 1970s when rodeo first became a major sports enterprise. The biography, Horses That Buck puts readers in the saddle to experience the life of a champion rider in his quest for the gold buckle. Inducted into the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum's Rodeo Hall of Fame in 2000, Smith was a legend in his own time. His story is a genuine slice of rodeo life--a life of magic for those good enough to win.
Sherlock Holmes: The Montana Chronicles, John Fitzpatrick, Riverbend Publishing;
Fitzpatrick is a native of Anaconda, Montana and he has worked as a lobbyist for the utility, telecommunications and metal mining industries.
“For the first time, here are the long-lost records of four intriguing mysteries solved by the famous English detective Sherlock Holmes when he traveled to Montana in the late 1800s. Using his inimitable eye for clues, his astounding deductive reasoning, and – when necessary – clever subterfuge, Holmes solves a very public murder at the famous Opera House, a supernatural theft of gold at a mine near Georgetown Lake, the disturbing threats to Copper King Marcus Daly’s most famous racehorse, and the sudden odd behavior of a miner’s wife.” – Riverbend Publishing
Wind River Country, Bayard Fox and Claude Poulet, Fremont County Publishing
“Wind River Country, Hidden Heart of Wyoming is a 176 page book containing hundreds of color pictures by Claude Poulet, the award winning French photographer who fell in love with this country and has spent much of his time here for the last 25 years and lengthy text by Bayard Fox, owner of the Bitterroot Ranch.” - Bitterroot Ranch
Zonta Best Woman Writer
The Wide Open, Edited by Annick Smith and Susan O'Connor, University of Nebraska Press
The Wide Open reveals how some of the most interesting and accomplished writers and photographers in the country give the uniqueness of the prairie a vision and a voice. Their stories range from fiction by Barry Lopez, Richard Ford, and William Kittredge, to the childhood histories of Mary Clearman Blew and Judy Blunt and the nonfiction narratives of Jim Harrison, Gretel Ehrlich, and Rick Bass. There are works by Native Americans such as M. L. Smoker and James Welch and the photographic interpretations of Lee Friedlander, Lois Conner, and Geoffrey James.
Road Map to Holland, Jennifer Graf Groneberg, New American Library/Penguin
An advocate for children with disabilities Groneberg is a woman of many trades, including; writer, secretary, home school teacher, mailman, waitress, and librarian. She resides in the mountains of Montana with her husband and two sons.
When Jennifer Groneberg and her husband Tom learned they'd be having twin boys, their main concern was whether they'd need an addition on their house. Then, five days after Avery and Bennett were born, Avery was diagnosed with Down syndrome. Road Map to Holland is the story of what follows. Montana author Jennifer Graf Groneberg offers a wealth of insight, information, and even practical resources for families whose children have Down syndrome. Rich with honesty, wisdom, and a deep appreciation for every day miracles, Road Map to Holland is a thoughtful, moving meditation on the struggles and joys Groneberg and her family experienced during her son Avery’s first two years.
Horses That Buck, Margot Kahn, University of Oklahoma Press
A Cleveland, Ohio native, Kahn received her MFA from Columbia University and has worked as a journalist, editor, speechwriter and arts administrator. She received the Ohio Library Association’s Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant in 2005.
“Horses That Buck is the story of Bill Smith, a Wyoming cowboy, and the transformation of his world, the frontier West. Born in 1941, Smith grew up poor in a Montana mining town and left home in the late 1950's to make a life in the rodeo.” – Writer’s Block
YMCA Writer's Voice 402 North 32nd 59101 248-1685 ext 231 www.billingsymca.org The Writer's Voice is a literary program of the Billings YMCA. Related:
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