STATE Programs
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3rd Saturdays of each month
Program Start Time: 1:30pm, expected to take approximately one hour per program (30- to 40-minute presentations followed by 15-20 minutes Q&A and announcements. Next Program:
June 21, 2025 See Below for Details! |
Kansas Authors Club Social (a Zoom meet up)
2nd Tuesdays, 7:00pm CST
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- Districts and city groups/small writing groups are invited to incorporate these programs into their meetings as they see fit. For groups meeting on the 3rd Saturday of the month, the programs can be viewed live via Zoom as they are taking place. Program recordings will be available to district and group leaders for a period of one month for meetings held at other times.
- All members will receive the link for zoom attendance to make watching from home a possibility. Attendance in person is recommended and encouraged, whenever possible!
- Most meetings will be hosted by a KAC district on location and available to the rest of the state by tuning in on Zoom. Where applicable, we will list the location of the presenter so that members who would like to attend the presentation in person will be able to do so.
2025 PROGRAMS
Sign-on Required.
Link has also been emailed to all members.
Link has also been emailed to all members.
June 21, 2025 - 1:30 p.m.
Program: Goal Setting for Authors
Whether you're just starting your writing journey or navigating the complexities of a multi-project career, having clear goals can transform your writing life. In this session, we’ll explore practical strategies for setting and tracking meaningful goals as an author. You’ll learn how to align your goals with your values, break big dreams into manageable steps, and build habits that support long-term success. Perfect for writers at any stage, this workshop will help you move forward with clarity, confidence, and purpose.
Presenter: Abbi Lee has always found joy within the world of a book. In grade school, she remembers regularly riding her bike to her small town library to check out the next book in the A to Z Mysteries series. As an adult, she taught high school English and Social Studies before turning her full attention to writing. Abbi now works as a copywriter for a marketing agency, has been published in multiple magazines, and recently released Ghost Town Treasure Hunt, the first novel in her debut middle-grade series, Geocache Club, with Chicken Scratch Books. Outside of reading and writing, Abbi also enjoys cooking new recipes, geocaching for hidden treasures, and going on adventures with her husband and two daughters.
Whether you're just starting your writing journey or navigating the complexities of a multi-project career, having clear goals can transform your writing life. In this session, we’ll explore practical strategies for setting and tracking meaningful goals as an author. You’ll learn how to align your goals with your values, break big dreams into manageable steps, and build habits that support long-term success. Perfect for writers at any stage, this workshop will help you move forward with clarity, confidence, and purpose.
Presenter: Abbi Lee has always found joy within the world of a book. In grade school, she remembers regularly riding her bike to her small town library to check out the next book in the A to Z Mysteries series. As an adult, she taught high school English and Social Studies before turning her full attention to writing. Abbi now works as a copywriter for a marketing agency, has been published in multiple magazines, and recently released Ghost Town Treasure Hunt, the first novel in her debut middle-grade series, Geocache Club, with Chicken Scratch Books. Outside of reading and writing, Abbi also enjoys cooking new recipes, geocaching for hidden treasures, and going on adventures with her husband and two daughters.
July 19, 2025 - 1:30 p.m.
Audio Book Panel
President Anne Spry will be moderating a panel on the various ways members have been publishing audio books.
Confirmed Panelists:
Grant Overstake is author and producer of The Real Education of TJ Crowley. The novel was adapted into a full-cast audio drama featuring performances by a national cast and the ARISE Ensemble. The production earned an Earphones Award from AudioFile Magazine and won the 2025 Audie Award for Best Young Adult Audiobook.
Robert Rebein is an essayist and novelist with a special insterest in the American West. As author and narrator of The Last Rancher and Headlights on the Prairie: Essays on Home, Rebein has recorded his own audio books
Ben Stanton is an audio book narrator and producer based in Topeka, Kansas.
Stay tuned... more details to come
President Anne Spry will be moderating a panel on the various ways members have been publishing audio books.
Confirmed Panelists:
Grant Overstake is author and producer of The Real Education of TJ Crowley. The novel was adapted into a full-cast audio drama featuring performances by a national cast and the ARISE Ensemble. The production earned an Earphones Award from AudioFile Magazine and won the 2025 Audie Award for Best Young Adult Audiobook.
Robert Rebein is an essayist and novelist with a special insterest in the American West. As author and narrator of The Last Rancher and Headlights on the Prairie: Essays on Home, Rebein has recorded his own audio books
Ben Stanton is an audio book narrator and producer based in Topeka, Kansas.
Stay tuned... more details to come
August 16, 2025 - 1:30 p.m.
Program: A Creative Guide to Writing Your Family's Stories
Presented by Kim Stanley (Kansas Humanities)
Details to come.
Presented by Kim Stanley (Kansas Humanities)
Details to come.
September 20, 2025
No State Program - Join us in person at the Kansas Book Festival, Washburn Campus, in Topeka.
Writing Retreat - October 3-5, 2025*
*there will be bonus add-on day October 2 for those who wish to participate!
*there will be bonus add-on day October 2 for those who wish to participate!
Kansas Authors Club Writing Retreat at Rock Springs Ranch, Junction City, Kansas
1:30 pm -- October 11, 2024
Annual Meeting of the
General Membership
Annual Meeting of the
General Membership
This meeting will take place on Zoom. Please note that this is the 2nd Saturday of the month rather than our typical 3rd Saturday for meeting.
November 15, 2025 - 1:30 p.m.
Program: Lowering Your Standards
Presented by William Sheldon
Presented by William Sheldon
Poet Bill Sheldon will share an approach he's had success with, one designed to reduce the anxiety of a blank page/screen.
Author William Sheldon was born in Colorado, and moved with his family to Emporia at age 5. Sheldon spent much of his life in Kansas, but also lived in California. He received his Master of Fine Arts at Wichita State University. Sheldon was a professor of English at Hutchinson Community College in Hutchinson, Kansas, where he taught creative writing. His poetry has appeared in such journals as Blue Mesa Review, Flint Hills Review, Coal City Review, and Midwest Quarterly.
His books are Retrieving Old Bones (Woodley 2002, Kansas City Star Noteworthy Book), Into Distant Grass (chapbook Midwest Quarterly, 2008), Deadman (Spartan Press 2021).
His books are Retrieving Old Bones (Woodley 2002, Kansas City Star Noteworthy Book), Into Distant Grass (chapbook Midwest Quarterly, 2008), Deadman (Spartan Press 2021).
December - No State Program
Check with your local chapter or district leader for area meeting information.
past programs:
Program: Q&A With Award Winning Authors
Program Location: Zoom
Join us in conversation with Kansas Authors Club 2024 book award winners Jim Gilkeson (2024 Coffin Nonfiction), Marilyn Hope Lake (2024 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).
Join us in conversation with Kansas Authors Club 2024 book award winners Jim Gilkeson (2024 Coffin Nonfiction), Marilyn Hope Lake (2024 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).
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.
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.
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
Program: Grand Openings
Presented by Mary-Lane Kamberg
Covering: Craft (skills and techiniques), Writing
Start your articles, stories and poems on the right foot. We hear so much about the importance of hooking the reader, but little about how to do that. This workshop gives practical tips and examples of some of the most effective types of opening leads to grab editors and agents and drag them into the work the rest.
Presenter: Mary-Lane Kamberg, Olathe, Kansas, is a professional writer with more than twenty-five years’ experience. She is the author of more than 30 books. Her articles have appeared in Better Homes and Gardens, Marriage and Family Living, Christian Science Monitor, Healthy Kids and many others.
Mary-Lane's poetry, essays and short stories have appeared in several anthologies and literary journals including: Chicken Soup for the Soul, A Celebration of Women, Beginning from the Middle (anthology); Sacred Feathers (anthology); The Season of Light (anthology); Kansas City Star, Late Knocking, Mediphors, Mid-America Poetry Review, Potpourri, and others. Her poetry chapbook Seed Rain was published by Finishing Line Press.
Presented by Mary-Lane Kamberg
Covering: Craft (skills and techiniques), Writing
Start your articles, stories and poems on the right foot. We hear so much about the importance of hooking the reader, but little about how to do that. This workshop gives practical tips and examples of some of the most effective types of opening leads to grab editors and agents and drag them into the work the rest.
Presenter: Mary-Lane Kamberg, Olathe, Kansas, is a professional writer with more than twenty-five years’ experience. She is the author of more than 30 books. Her articles have appeared in Better Homes and Gardens, Marriage and Family Living, Christian Science Monitor, Healthy Kids and many others.
Mary-Lane's poetry, essays and short stories have appeared in several anthologies and literary journals including: Chicken Soup for the Soul, A Celebration of Women, Beginning from the Middle (anthology); Sacred Feathers (anthology); The Season of Light (anthology); Kansas City Star, Late Knocking, Mediphors, Mid-America Poetry Review, Potpourri, and others. Her poetry chapbook Seed Rain was published by Finishing Line Press.
Program: Finding the Heart of Your Story: Writing Stronger Stories and Making Smarter Revisions
Presented by Lori Martin
Presented by Lori Martin
This program on the craft of writing is a good fit for a diverse group of writers and offers valuable insight into the craft of storytelling.
Lori Martin is an Associate Professor of English at Pittsburg State University, where she teaches creative writing courses. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The Cincinnati Review, The MacGuffin, The Maine Review, Midwest Quarterly, Prick of the Spindle, Room Magazine, Tampa Review, and others.
Martin's writing has been recognized with awards from The Cincinnati Review and Kansas Voices. A graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, she was named a Truman Capote Fellow and received the Clark Fischer Ansley Award for Excellence in Fiction.
In addition to her teaching and writing, Martin serves as the poetry editor for The Midwest Quarterly and editor in chief of River Styx magazine.
Martin's writing has been recognized with awards from The Cincinnati Review and Kansas Voices. A graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, she was named a Truman Capote Fellow and received the Clark Fischer Ansley Award for Excellence in Fiction.
In addition to her teaching and writing, Martin serves as the poetry editor for The Midwest Quarterly and editor in chief of River Styx magazine.
Program: Based on True Events: How to Incorporate History Into Your Writing
Presented by Jillian Forsberg
Covering: Craft (skills and techiniques), Writing
Presented by Jillian Forsberg
Covering: Craft (skills and techiniques), Writing
Kansas author Jillian Forsberg holds a master’s degree in public history from Wichita State University and a bachelor’s degree in communication and history from McPherson College. Her research on little-known historical events led her to discover the true story behind her first novel, The Rhino Keeper.
Jillian is a regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and leads the Manuscript Matchup beta reader program through History Through Fiction.
You can find Jillian gardening, browsing the closest antique mall, or reading every label at a museum. She'll most likely be wearing vintage dresses, except when she's at the zoo.
Jillian owns a bridal store and has worked in bridal since 2007. She lives in Wichita, Kansas, with her husband, child, and pets.
Jillian’s second novel is written and she's working on a third. She will always write animal stories.
Jillian is a regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and leads the Manuscript Matchup beta reader program through History Through Fiction.
You can find Jillian gardening, browsing the closest antique mall, or reading every label at a museum. She'll most likely be wearing vintage dresses, except when she's at the zoo.
Jillian owns a bridal store and has worked in bridal since 2007. She lives in Wichita, Kansas, with her husband, child, and pets.
Jillian’s second novel is written and she's working on a third. She will always write animal stories.
Program: What the publishing industry entails and what it means to be an author and a publisher
A conversation with Steve Semken, Ice Cube Press
A conversation with Steve Semken, Ice Cube Press
Steve Semken founded Ice Cube Press in 1991 to use the literary arts to better understand how to live in the Midwest.
"It’s hard to even be a bad writer once you decide you want to be writer. Write and read. And, treat other authors as you would like to be treated." -- Steve Semken, author spotlight at Ames Writers Collective
"It’s hard to even be a bad writer once you decide you want to be writer. Write and read. And, treat other authors as you would like to be treated." -- Steve Semken, author spotlight at Ames Writers Collective