Jeff Broome received this news from his publisher, a great review!

Comprised of thirteen specific incidences of Native American conflict with encroaching Americans forces, Indian Raids and Massacres: Essays on the Central Plains Indian War (Paperback - August 24, 2020) is enhanced for academia and the non-specialist general reader with the inclusion of a twenty-eight page Bibliography and a fourteen page Index. Exceptionally well written, organized and presented, Indian Raids and Massacres: Essays on the Central Plains Indian War is an extraordinary work of original scholarship and unreservedly recommended for community, college, and university library Native American History and Western American History collections and supplemental curriculum reading lists.

~Midwest Book Review

Today we welcome Anne Kniggendorf as a new member of the Kansas Authors Club. She lives in Shawnee. 

Anne released a book in September entitled: Secret Kansas City. Check it out here: https://annekniggendorf.com/index.php/secret-kansas-city/

What kind of writing do you do, Anne? Journalism, creative nonfiction, fiction

Please share information about writing projects you’ve completed or are currently working on: I write for several media agencies around Kansas City, mostly for KCUR 89.3 (NPR in Kansas City), but sometimes the Star, the Pitch, and others.


Do you have a website or a facebook page that you'd like us to share with other KAC members? annekniggendorf.com and https://www.facebook.com/AnneKKniggendorf
 
What would you like to gain from your membership with the Kansas Authors Club?  I think all of the above (or below)

1. Networking and/or friendships with other writers
   
2. Entering the KAC writing contests
   
3. Information on the writing craft
   
4. Information on publishing
   
5. Information on promotion
   

 
Anne provided two links of upcoming online events: 
This one is today at 2:00 p.m. https://www.wornallmajors.org/read-with-us-in-2021/

And this one is on March 9. https://www.mymcpl.org/events/69467/secret-kansas-city-zoom


We're happy to have you with us, Anne! And we hope to meet you in person one of these days. 

University Press of Kansas has agreed to offer members of KAC a 30% discount on copies of Warner's book. Beginning today, this offer is good through March 31, 2021, and applies only to online purchases from University Press of Kansas using the Promo Code KAC30.  (https://kansaspress.ku.edu/978-0-7006-2773-8.html)  ​

The following Kansas Authors Club members had essays selected for publication in the first issue of 105: Meadowlark Reader, a Kansas journal of creative nonfiction. Issue #1, with the theme of "beginnings," is expected to be delivered to subscribers in early May, featuring 35 essays, including the following:

Gretchen Eick - D5
Marie Fletcher - D7
Beth Gulley - D2
Miriam Iwashige - D6
Nancy Julien Kopp - D4
Sandee Lee - D5
Don Marler - D5
Ruth Maus - D1
Julie Nischan - D1
Kevin Rabas - D2
Mark Scheel - D2
Julie Sellers - D4
Tyler Sheldon - D2
Julie Stielstra - D6
Barbara Waterman-Peters - D1
Jon Yenser - D7
Gloria Zachgo - D5
Ginger Zyskowski - D6

Cheryl Unruh (D2) of Quincy Press is the editor of the new journal, and Tracy Million Simmons (D2) of Meadowlark Press is the publisher. Readers are encouraged to subscribe before March 1 to take advantage of introductory pricing. 

For those interested in submitting essays for issue #2, the theme will be "Kansas Travel Stories" and they will begin collecting those submissions in May and June of 2021

See 105meadowlarkreader.com for complete details.

You are invited to a Zoom meeting.

When: Feb 13, 2021 01:30 PM Central Time (US and Canada)
 
Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUqc-yopjwoHN2ioy00kkxQgCeOpVsOReY9
 
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
​

If you have news of writing events that would be of interest to all Kansas Authors Club members, or if you are a member (dues current) who would like to announce an achievement, please submit your news via this form. ​

Note from Nancy:

"My story "Love on a Plate" was published in LifeStory Journal yesterday. Charley Kempthorne, a writer from KS who now resides in WA, is the editor. He welcomes submissions. This is a no pay but a nice monthly journal. You can read the story on p. 4 of the journal.

Note: A recipe is included in the story but two ingredients were accidentally omitted. If anyone tries it, please add 3/4 c. milk and 1 scant cup chopped dates or it may result in disaster!​

​February Author Talk: Chuck Warner

Birds, Bones, and Beetles: The Improbable Career and Remarkable Legacy of University of Kansas Naturalist Charles D. Bunker

Winner:
2020 Martin Kansas History Book Award
​&
2020 "Looks Like A Million" Design Award

Tuesday, February 23, 7pm
Click here to register (must register to attend).
University Press of Kansas has agreed to offer members of KAC a 30% discount on copies of Warner's book. Beginning today, this offer is good through March 31, 2021, and applies only to online purchases from University Press of Kansas using the Promo Code KAC30.  (https://kansaspress.ku.edu/978-0-7006-2773-8.html)  
​
​“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.”

-Thomas C. Percy, PhD, judge, 2020 Martin Kansas History Book Award

March Author Talk: Michael D. Graves

All Hallows' Shadows

Winner:
2020 J. Donald Coffin Memorial Book Award

Tuesday, March 23, 7pm
Click here to register (must register to attend).
​
"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."

-William Sheldon, judge, 2020 J. Donald Coffin Memorial Book Award

Edna Bell-Pearson passed peacefully on Friday morning, January 22, 2021, at the age of 100 and 44 days. She had been residing in an independent living apartment in Louisburg, Kansas. Edna was married to Carl Ungerer from 1945 to 1959. She reunited with the Ungerer family in recent years, upon publication of her memoir, Headwinds, which details the four years after World War II when she was married to Carl Ungerer, with whom she helped build the first airport in Marysville, Kansas. At a time when the flying industry was really starting to "take off," Edna was a very accomplished pilot, making many flights across the Kansas countryside.

Edna Bell was born to Elizabeth Evangeline (Bessie) Booth and Fred Hunter Pearson. Edna was the oldest of four children, three younger brothers who predeceased her.

Her website lists her careers “other than writing” as everything from babysitting, housekeeping, and dog walking, beginning as a teenager, to being a co-operator of the first airport in Marysville, Kansas, a farmer/rancher, real estate promoter, radio and TV news reporter and more. Edna’s talents were broad and varied, and her skill at writing stories that captured readers was surpassed by few.

As well as hundreds of published stories, articles, essays, and poems, Edna was most noted for her first book, Fragile Hopes, Transient Dreams and Other Stories, a southwest Kansas saga which was chosen during the Kansas sesquicentennial year as one of the “150 Best Kansas Books.” In 2020, Headwinds, a Memoir (Meadowlark Books), was selected as a Kansas Notable Book. Edna was a regular contributor to Kansas! Magazine and Grit Magazine for more than a decade. She wrote flying columns for the Marysville Advocate in the late 1940s, and a weekly business column for the Dodge City Daily Globe in the 1970s. Her work as stringer, reporter, feature writer, and editor appeared in the Jonesboro Sun (Arkansas), Kansas City Star, Spokane Chronicle/Spokesman Review, St. Louis Post Dispatch, and others.

In Edna’s own words: “I don’t profess to be a great writer, but a dedicated scriber/scribbler, and considering the quality/quantity of work I’ve put out over the years, I think I’m safe in signing myself off as a bona fide writer/author.
“A question often asked is how or when or why I became a writer. I didn’t “become” a writer; I was born a writer. I don’t remember when I wasn’t writing. I don’t know where my writing genes came from. To my knowledge, no other member of my family, immediate or in the distant past, has shown the slightest interest in putting pen to paper. I’ve been told that, from the time my chubby hands could negotiate a pencil, my favorite pastime was sitting with pencil and paper, deeply engrossed in scribbling. I wrote my first poem when I was five, a silly, poorly composed, rhymed thing which I still have, forever preserved, in my grandmother’s commonplace book.

“For the most part, I lived with my grandparents until I was eleven. Grandma was a great teacher; she instilled in me a love for the Bible (Grandma was very religious) and a love of reading. She loved poetry and, though she never wrote any herself, I think she hoped I’d turn out to be a poet. When I was born, Grandma and Granddaddy bought me a “Birth” day present—The Books of Knowledge. I still have the complete set—well worn—in the original case. As a child, I spent hours daily, lying on the floor in the living room, one or more of the books open before me. I virtually devoured the stories and poems, but I also spent a lot of time on astronomy, French, and geography.

“Grandma and The Books of Knowledge must have educated me well, because I skipped both the second and the fourth grades. However, I evidently used all my stored knowledge in my earlier years because once I became a fifth grader—although I still got lots of A’s—I was just an average student.”

Edna never did stop writing and had a work in progress, entitled A Tribute To A Man Folks Didn't Like Very Much. Edna also had plans for five additional books about her life, with the working titles of In the Beginning; Living off the Land; Highways and Byways; Friends and Lovers; and Old Like Me.

Edna was buried at the Hooker Cemetery, Hooker, Oklahoma, next to her grandparents.

Today we'd like to offer a warm welcome to new KAC member Ronn Peters of McPherson! 


Name: Ronn Peters     
Town: McPherson, Ks

What kind of writing do you do? 

Short pieces titled “The Way I See It, Irvin 2.0”  or “The Way I Remember It.” This could be humor, politics, religion, or whatever.

If you would like to, please share information about writing projects you’ve completed or are currently working on. 

Whatever interests me today, tomorrow or last week.

Do you have a website or a facebook page that you'd like us to share with other KAC members?  

Working on that.

What would you like to gain from your membership with the Kansas Authors Club?  

​Insights into Kansas and Kansans.

[CU]

Meeting on Saturday, January 23 at 1:30pm on Zoom.

See this page for complete details.

Broome is an expert historian and writer on the interactions of the settlers, the army, and the Indians of our Western Plains. While many writers give a romanticized view of the West, Broome offers a view of warfare that includes an examination of the atrocities from both sides.  
   Thanks to the use of seldom seen original Indian depredation files held at the National Archives, Broome gives a rare first-hand account of the Wild West.

Emporia, KS – Kansas Poems “is a poetry of place and microhistory, which nonetheless transcends the people and events it tells about . . . And while I’ve never been to Kansas, I now feel that I might have—or at least that there is a Kansas of my mind, a place of lakes and fireflies and small lives.” –Laura Chalar, author of Unlearning and Midnight at the Law Firm

Brian Daldorph’s eighth full-length collection of poetry is a tribute to his adopted state, Kansas, where he has lived through the four seasons year by year, in Lawrence.
 
Daldorph is originally from England and had made a home for himself here through his teaching at the University of Kansas and at the Douglas County Jail. He is also the editor of Coal City Review.

Kansas poetry blooms in these pages, not only poems set in Lawrence, Linwood, Garden City, and Coffeyville, but also in the more mythological locations of Stony Creek Cemetery, Brook Creek Park, Oak Hill Cemetery and Stull, which, legend has it, is one of the gates of Hell.

These are poems about Kansas people: a Vietnam vet still angry at the government who betrayed him; undertaker Zeke Haskins, looking out of his office window at his dying small town. The football coach’s wife who fears that her husband will recruit their sons for the sport he loves.

There are ghost stories here, jail visits, love stories and break ups, a Kansas story about Brown Recluse spiders and Black Widows “waiting in outhouses and dreams with that one bite/ to freeze your limbs and jam your lungs . . .”
 
Kansas Poems was chosen as the finalist for the 2020 Birdy Poetry Prize contest. To celebrate, Daldorph and Meadowlark Press will be hosting a free, public virtual book launch via Zoom at 6 p.m. on February 5. The event is particularly meaningful, as it specially recognizes the 100th birthday of Daldorph’s mother, who passed in 2015. Please register for the event at: tinyurl.com/kspoemsregistration.
 
Daldorph will do a second, shorter reading of Kansas Poems with the winner of the 2020 Birdy Poetry Prize, JC Mehta, on March 13, along with the winner and finalist of last year’s contest, Carol Kapaun Ratchenski (A Certain Kind of Forgiveness) and Ruth Maus (Valentine).
 
Kansas Poems is available for order at: meadowlark-books.square.site/ and wherever you buy books.

Today we are welcoming Carol Grieb to the Kansas Authors Club! Carol looks forward to building connections with other writers. 

Name: Carol Grieb

Town: Lawrence

What kind of writing do you do? 
​
Mostly non-fiction

If you would like to, please share information about writing projects you’ve completed or are currently working on.

Published: “A Truant Disposition: discovering the tragedy of Hamlet through the role of Horatio,Revised Second Edition”
In progress: Dad Notebook
Time, Divinity, Eternity

Do you have a website or a facebook page that you’d like us to share with other KAC members? 

http://carolgrieb.com/


And the facebook site:
 https://www.facebook.com/The-tragedy-of-Hamlet-through-the-role-of-Horatio-101380775288192

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UZLD3CQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1​
 

D5 member Robert L. Dean, Jr.'s poem "The Tear" just came out in the new issue of October Hill Magazine. A link to the magazine's issue archives is provided below. The new issue is OHM Winter 2020, Volume 4, Issue 4. You can either 1: click on the image of the issue cover, which will open up the issue, or 2: click on "New! Digital Download," which is a much better way to open the issue; it will not download to your computer but open as a pdf, you have to click on the download icon after the issue opens to download the issue to your computer. Dean's poem "The Tear" is the last item in the issue, on page 164. A beautiful online magazine, and very nice folks. This is Dean's second appearance in October Hill Magazine. Link:


October Hill Magazine Archives

D5 member Robert L. Dean, Jr.'s poem "Cloudy with a Chance of Miracles," from Dean's latest book, The Aerialist Will Not Be Performing, was featured Sunday, January 10th, on Ken Hada's podcast "The Sunday Poems with Ken Hada." It is part of Episode #120. This is the Second Sunday in a row Ken has read from Dean's recent book. Ken also reads one of his own poems, "What We Have Lost," and briefly reflects on the events from Wednesday, January 6th. The podcast can be found anywhere podcasts are broadcast, and also at the link to Ken's website here:

Episode 120: Loss & A Chance of Miracles by The Sunday Poems with Ken Hada • A podcast on Anchor