We have made our selection for the Kansas Authors Club Book of the Year.  We were impressed with the quality of the books submitted for review.  

After careful deliberation we have chosen I Love the Child, by Ronda Miller. First, the size and feel of the book would make it easy to read to a small group of children. The illustrations beautifully matched the poem on the page. There was diversity of ethnicity, physical condition, and gender. The Spanish co-text should make it appealing to a wide range of children. We could identify characteristics of children we have raised and known, and think that older children could see themselves in some of these characters. We think the book could be used with a wide age range. The cooking section expands the number of activities that could be used with the book. This is a book that we would like to give to important young people in our lives.

Thank you for asking us to be a review panel. We enjoyed the process and for the opportunity to read these books.

Allison and Gary Haworth

Judges Allison and Gary Haworth have two adult daughters: Mary Kate and Becky. Allison is a graduate of the University of Kansas and taught early elementary school in the Lawrence school district prior to having children. Raising her own children instilled a passion for young children. Allison has been a preschool teacher for the Lawrence Arts Center for the past 20 years. Gary Haworth is an elementary curriculum PhD graduate of the University of Iowa. He has taught at the elementary school level and was a central office and elementary school administrator. He is now retired. 

The design of Birds, Bones and Beetles by Chuck Warner, effectively evoked the era of Kansas naturalist Charles D. Bunker, subtly suggested the subject matter through its use of front cover photographs and historical typeface. I appreciated the use of black and white photographs throughout the text and the straight-forward layout. To me, a good book design does two things simultaneously; it draws attention to the book while not distracting from the essential character of its narrative.

Judge Rick Mitchell has been a professional artist/photographer since 1974. He was professor of photography at Rutgers University for eighteen years and has taught at other institutions including Baker University and the University of Kansas. He is a former Director of the Exhibition Program at the Lawrence Arts Center where he was, for five years, the publisher of Cottonwood Literary Magazine in cooperation with the University of Kansas Department of English, and a founder of the Committee on Imagination & Place and the I&P Press. 

The Martin Kansas History Book Award goes to Chuck Warner for his book, Birds, Bones, and Beetles: The Improbable Career and Remarkable Legacy of University of Kansas Naturalist Charles D. Bunker.
 
“While reading Chuck Warner’s book, I felt myself being transported back in time and seeing life through the eyes of Charles Bunker. Birds, Bones, and Beetles tells the story of naturalist Charles Bunker's life from his early years in Illinois in the late 1800s through his long career at the University of Kansas. Much like Charles Bunker, the book itself is unassuming and down to earth. Warner takes care to not only reveal Bunker's strengths but also his flaws. Yet, the book is more than a biography. Warner ties Bunker into a larger world that include his relationships with his colleagues and family, developments within the University of Kansas, and the natural history of the state. This well written and well researched book is not only a treat to read but is a valuable contribution to the history of Kansas.”

Though born in Canada, Thomas C. Percy has lived in Kansas since 1990.  He received his B.A. in History and a B.Ed. from Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. Inspired by several outstanding history professors, he continued with higher education acquiring his M.A. in history from Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas.
 
During a seminar at the University of Kansas, Percy researched and wrote a paper on the origins of the Kansas State Fair. The topic proved fertile ground and Percy expanded the paper into his dissertation, “A History of the Kansas State Fair, 1863-2006.” As chance would have it, Percy found a position teaching history at Hutchinson Community College, the permanent home of the Kansas State Fair.  
 
While Percy has enjoyed teaching at Hutchinson Community College since 1994, he has also published Images of America: Kansas State Fair in 2014 and has reviewed books in the Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire, Teaching History: A Journal of Methods and Kansas History.
 

Jon Kelly Yenser's, The News as Usual, published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2019.
 
Of all our poets, he seemed most attentive to the wonders of language in his evocation of Kansas. My inadequate commentary on his superlative and complex book of poems follows.
 
The title for Jon Kelly Yenser’s 2019 collection of poems, The News as Usual, accurately and profoundly describes his poetry although the “usual” here is shown to be startling and wondrous and occasionally wry and subtly humorous. Yenser writes from the ground up in choosing both his words and the subjects for his poems, reflecting his recognition that the "news," that is, ordinary life during all seasons in Kansas—in fields, in the backyards of its small towns, and in friendships—can be astonishing.
 
Neither idealizing nor prettifying his Kansas, Yenser chooses language precisely and astonishingly. He creates metaphors that make the familiar spring wondrously into new life, thereby making the usual news become unusual. Thus, in one poem he may refer to “the burnt umber of milo” and in another to “rusty milo.” Attuned to the seasonal, he refers to summer’s “frenzied raspberries” and to spring’s forsythia as “ornate as art deco, . . . offering us gild antennae.” Literary allusions intersect with astonishing, commonplace words such as “kerflooey” or newly generated words such as “zitty,” playful and humorous. 
 
The “news” which Yenser’s poetry focuses on most frequently is seasonal and temporal in addition to his friendships with dogs and his dying and stalwart neighbor Fred. He keeps his eye peeled for owls. A journey to Guatamala, however, proves largely distracting. Throughout this collection, Yenser is most consistently aware of seasonal changes close to home, to the simultaneous wonder and tenuousness of life close by. His news is expressed in language nuanced, multi-faceted, often punning, playful, and surprising. Through his stunning choice of words, his “usual” becomes imbued with the unusual and memorable, the ordinary with the extraordinary and surprising. Thus, in a brief poem, he contemplates Fall: “What’s done is done / almost now almost /all the dun leaves / have come undone.” In the conclusion of a long poem, titled “Cleaning Up in October,” Yenser’s description of an owl—“quiet as a moth/ over the soccer fields, listening/for the click/ of the smallest teeth/ all over town, from love, habit,/ and the coming cold”—evokes all beings as they persist in ongoing life. Yenser’s poetry--his incisive choice or words, his incise wit--makes me aware of how the usual becomes wondrous, the ordinary memorable and amazing. In his poetry, the usual news in Kansas becomes astonishing and memorable.”
 

About the Judge: During her 34 years of teaching English at the University of Kansas, Beth was known as a scholar of African American literature and of Herman Melville. She also wrote two collections of essays, one focused on Kansas and the other on her summer community in northern Michigan. From 1958-1961, she taught English at the high school and junior college levels in Osaka, Japan. She taught as an American Literature Fulbright-Hays lecturer from 1970 - 1974 and as a Fall 1992 American Literature and Culture lecturer at 7 universities, Africa at the Universities of Ibadan, Makerere, Dar es Salaam during the summer of 1972, Russia, where she taught a New York University summer session at the University of St. Petersburg, and China.  In 2007, she traveled to the Beijing Foreign Studies University in China as a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer. There she offered courses on American Women Writers and the very first Ecocriticism course to be offered at a Chinese university. Other awards she has been honored with include the John Masefield Prize for Fiction, Wellesley College 1958; the Major Hopwood Award for Fiction, University of Michigan 1962; the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for Graduate Study, University of Michigan 1967; and the National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship in Historical, Social, and Cultural Studies of US Ethnic Minorities, 1974-1975. 
 
Following her retirement in 2001, she turned to writing poetry, and in the last twenty years has published numerous chapbooks as well as five collections of poetry (Conversations, Her Voice, Mrs. Noah Takes the Helm, The Sauntering Eye, and Water-Gazers). 

 

In All Hallows’ Shadows, Michael D. Graves serves up both homage and an original take on the hard-boiled detective genre. The mean streets of the novel are historic Wichita, Kansas, which Mr. Graves renders impeccably, edging in a history lesson with his mystery. Graves, an evident baseball fan, hits through the cycle of the genre’s tropes but does so in a manner entirely his own, realizing a style entirely his own. Out of a field of strong competition, my choice for the J. Donald Coffin Book Award is Michael D. Graves’s All Hallows’ Shadows.

Judge William Sheldon lives with his family in Hutchinson, Kansas where he teaches and writes. He took his BS and MA in English from Emporia State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Wichita State University. His poetry and prose have been published widely in such journals as Blue Mesa Review, Columbia, Flint Hills Review, New Letters, and Prairie Schooner. He is the author of two books of poetry, Retrieving Old Bones (Woodley, 2002) and Rain Comes Riding (Mammoth, 2011), as well as a chapbook, Into Distant Grass (Oil Hill, 2009). Retrieving Old Bones was a Kansas City Star Noteworthy Book for 2002 and is listed as one of the Great Plains Alliance’s Great Books of the Great Plains. He plays bass for the band The Excuses.