January 18, 2025 - 1:30 p.m.
Program Location: Zoom
Program Location: Zoom
Current members receive an link to the monthly program on Zoom via the monthly e-newsletter. The link is also available using the button above which takes you to our members-only pages. Sign-on is required.
Join us in conversation with Kansas Authors Club 2024 book award winners Jim Gilkeson (Coffin Nonfiction), Marilyn Hope Lake (Coffin Fiction), Jerilynn Henrikson (Martin KS History), Lisa Hase-Jackson (Nelson Poetry), and Ann Vigola Anderson (Design). We will discuss writing, entering contests, and best practices for producing an award winning book. Panel moderated by Anne Spry (Design Award Winner & State President).
From the opening poem of Lisa Hase-Jackson's impactful collection, Insomnia in Another Town, we learn that "There is no small grief...all are interconnected." These poems, cloaked in memory and the unmaking and re-making of family, travel us through the harvest of a poet's life. Like the farms she made grow, this book tills the soil of a human soul and all the many experiences that make it. In pantoums, free verse, and prose poems, Hase-Jackson demonstrates the way that every lived experience weaves into a root system that bears unique fruit, singular as our heartbeats, our winding fingerprints. -Ashley M. Jones, poet laureate of Alabama
Winner of the 2024 Nelson Poetry Book Award
Winner of the 2024 Nelson Poetry Book Award
Jim Gilkeson takes you on a storyteller's journey into three tiny, experimental subcultures in the U.S. and Europe. Told in a series of short interlocking vignettes spanning the years from 1949 to 2015, Gilkeson traces his unlikely path from his conventional upbringing in the Midwest, down the psychedelic rabbit hole of the late 1960s, to his years as a brother in an order of modern mystics and a practitioner and teacher of energy healing at a clothing-optional retreat center.
Three Lost Worlds: A Memoir of a life Among Mystics, Healers, and Life-Artists is an insider's account of life in the Holy Order of MANS, an esoteric spiritual order founded in San Francisco in the 1960s; an apprenticeship in energy healing with an Irish clairvoyant, the late Bob Moore; and a fourteen-year stint as a healer at Harbin Hot Springs in Northern California, which comes to an abrupt and devastating end in the wildfires of 2015.
Three Lost Worlds is set in part against the backdrop of cults and the paranoia surrounding them in the wake of the Jonestown mass suicides in the late 1970s, but it tells a different kind of story, one of spiritual and personal growth through the eyes of an insider. In the process, Three Lost Worlds offers the reader a reflection on an era in American spiritual history, the heartfelt journey of a modern spiritual seeker. Winner of the 2024 J. Donald & Bertha Coffin Memorial Book Award for Nonfiction.
Three Lost Worlds: A Memoir of a life Among Mystics, Healers, and Life-Artists is an insider's account of life in the Holy Order of MANS, an esoteric spiritual order founded in San Francisco in the 1960s; an apprenticeship in energy healing with an Irish clairvoyant, the late Bob Moore; and a fourteen-year stint as a healer at Harbin Hot Springs in Northern California, which comes to an abrupt and devastating end in the wildfires of 2015.
Three Lost Worlds is set in part against the backdrop of cults and the paranoia surrounding them in the wake of the Jonestown mass suicides in the late 1970s, but it tells a different kind of story, one of spiritual and personal growth through the eyes of an insider. In the process, Three Lost Worlds offers the reader a reflection on an era in American spiritual history, the heartfelt journey of a modern spiritual seeker. Winner of the 2024 J. Donald & Bertha Coffin Memorial Book Award for Nonfiction.
Our Mothers' Ghosts, by Marilyn Hope Lake: Forced to extremes in order to escape women’s accepted societal roles, the protagonists in this short story collection—the women of one midwestern river town family—overcome hardship and heartbreak, pain and pressure, in order to burst the bonds that hold them and bring forth a better future for their daughters and sons. Their struggles comprise a panorama of women’s issues that span the twentieth century: social injustice, sexism, discrimination, and racism. These ordinary women experienced it all, and the unique ways in which they dealt with these issues illustrate a past we should all hope to leave behind. Winner of the 2024 J. Donald & Bertha Coffin Memorial Book Award for Fiction.
Remembering Martha turns family history and lore into story. Martha grew up in the small town of Neosho Rapids, Kansas, at the turn of the 20th century. This book is an invitation to explore prairie life, its glories and its tragedies, through one woman whose indomitable spirit lives on through generations of grandchildren, including and especially, the author, Jerilynn Henrikson. This novella is a work of fiction inspired by an interview with the author's grandmother. Winner of the 2024 Martin Kansas History Book Award.
When the world shut down in March 2020, Author Anne Spry shut down emotionally ... until she had the time to really notice and appreciate her surroundings. She began taking photos of sunsets, sunrises, clouds and flowers. Poetry flowed out of her soul when she saw what the camera had captured. Now she is sharing her inspirations in hopes that this perspective on a largely negative era in our history will result in more universal gratitude. Winner of the 2024 "It Looks Like a Million" Design Award.
In the Adventures of Bottle Calf, author Ann Vigola Anderson takes us back in time to her grandparents’ farm where Bottle Calf was born during an early spring blizzard. With illustrations by the talented Sara Long, this gorgeous book will be your go-to for holiday gift giving and beyond. Grab a copy to reminisce or to share the stories and gorgeous art with your kids and grandkids. You are going to love Bottle Calf! Reconized - 2024 "It Looks Like a Million" Design Award
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