Category: Theme Prose
More Than a Manuscript: Words Take Root

First Place: ”The Garden Of Rejected Tales” by Julie A. Sellers, Atchison

Second Place: “Silent Reverie” by Mark Landon Jarvis, El Dorado

Third Place: “Uprooted—How I Became an Accidental Kansan” by Janice Northerns, Wichita

Honorable Mentions:
"From Tools to Roots” by Mason Taylor-Taite, Manhattan
”Roots” Julie A. Sellers, Atchison

Category: Stories Written for Young Readers

First Place: ”Pedro the Cat of Bee Mountain” by Jerilynn Jones Henrikson, Emporia

Second Place: “Tiny Mighty Eveliney” by Jerilynn Jones Henrikson, Emporia

Third Place: “The Story of Alex the Cat” by Mason Taylor-Taite, Manhattan

Honorable Mentions:
“The Case of the Missing Ears” by Julie A. Sellers, Atchison
“Get Outta My Womb by Jerilynn Jones Henrikson, Emporia

Category: Memoir/Inspirational

First Place:  “Anomalies” by Mark Landon Jarvis, El Dorado

Second Place: “The One We Usually Find When He’s Dead” by Sandra Lou Taylor

Third Place: “You’re Enough” by S.L. Brown

Honorable Mentions:
“The Yellow Gingham Sundress” by Aimee L. Gross, Topeka
“My Dad, Not a Father” by Marilynn Hope Lake, Columbia MO

Cateogory: Humor

First Place: “By the Numbers” by Julie A. Sellers, Atchison

Second Place: “Start of the Week Goes Down the Toilet at Local College” by Julie A. Sellers, Atchison

Third Place: “Shit Happens” by Jerilynn Jones Henrikson, Emporia

Honorable Mention: “Wilde Ride to the Delivery Room” by Mason Taylor-Taite, Manhattan

Honorable Mention: “Rebound Date” by Linda Cook, Manhattan

Category: Flash Fiction

First Place: ”Doctor VanFleet” by Marion J. Bollig, Baldwin

Second Place: “WAGONS,HO!” by Cheryl Unruh, Emporia

Third Place: “You Do What You Can” by Martha Wherry, Wichita

Honorable Mentions:
“Fight Like A Girl” by Katherine St. John, Shawnee
“A Prairie Puzzlement” by Jerilynn Jones Henrikson, Emporia

Category: First Chapter of a Book

First Place: ”Ravens of the Never Wood” by Aimee L. Gross, Topeka

Second Place: “Legacy and Lies” by Deborah Linn McNemee, El Dorado

Third Place: “Muscular Love” by Gretchen Cassel Eick, Wichita

Honorable Mentions:
“Disaster at Dawn” by Mary-Lane Kamberg, Olate
”A Senator is Missing” by Peg Nichols, Olathe
“The Cane” by Roger Keith Droz, Topeka

Category: Playwriting

First Place: A Shampoo and a Set by Julie A. Sellers, Atchison

Category: Rural Voices

First Place:  “Spikes of Light” by Hildebrand Wesley, 

Second Place: “Don’t Do That Again” by Sandra Lou Taylor, Towanda

Third Place: “Lost in the Wilderness” by Mason Taylor-Taite, Manhattan

Honorable Mentions:
“Snake Acres” by Janice Lee McClure, Sublette
“Rural Girl Goes to University” by Lindsey Bartlett, Emporia

Thanks to Janice Northerns for serving as our 2024 and 2025 Poetry Contest Manager!

Theme Category in Poetry
More Than a Manuscript: Words Take Root

First:  High Plains Childhood, Janice Lee McClure, Sublette

Second: Summon the Muse,  Arlice W. Davenport, Wichita

Third: The Beginning of All Things, Arlice W. Davenport, Wichita

HMs:
Cutting Wood,  Jeanice Eagan Davis, Clearwater
How Few Know the Way,  Arlice W. Davenport, Wichita

Category: Whimsy

First:  The Two Hemispheres Of My Brain in The Middle Of The Night Are Like, Julie Ann Baker Brin, Park City

Second: Hidden in Plain Sight, Julie Ann Baker Brin, Park City

Third: Father Love, Kristine A. Polansky, Manhattan

HMs:
Stopping by Woods for a Tasty Morsel, Mary-Lane Kamberg, Olathe
Little Miss Muffet Noir, Conrad Jestmore, Wichita

Category: Classic Forms

First: For the Love of Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Janice Lee McClure, Sublette

Second: 2025, Kristine A. Polansky, Manhattan

Third: The Vinegar Works, Janice Lee McClure, Sublette

HMs:
Full Moon IV and Gage Park Carousel, Janice Lee McClure, Sublette
Only I Know, Duane Johnson, Topeka

Category: Japanese Forms
​
First: Autumn’s coming soon, Kristine A. Polansky, Manhattan

Second: Study Abroad Day 2: Panteon Municipal Santa Rosa, Beth Gulley, Olathe

Third: A gentle fall rain, Kristine A. Polansky, Manhattan

HMs:
[Music Everywhere], Julie Ann Baker Brin, Park City
I wake to bird songs, Kristine A. Polansky, Manhattan

Category: Rural Voices
​
First: Firewatch, Kelly Johnston, Wichita

Second: Highway 40 Snowfall, Kristine A. Polansky, Manhattan

Third: High Plains Childhood: Summer, Janice Lee
McClure, Sublette

Honorable Mentions:
Flint Hills Elegy, Tim Keane, Manhattan
Cattle Control 2, Kelly Johnston, Wichita
Idyllic, Julie Ann Baker Brin, Park City
Night at the Farm, Brenda White, Emporia

Category: Free Verse

​First: Easter Morning, Brenda White, Emporia

Second: Mesmerized, Judy Oliver, Wichita

Third: Full Moon II, Janice Lee McClure, Sublette

Honorable Mentions:
Underground, Arlice W. Davenport, Wichita
Ten Years Before Cyberspace, Julie Ann Baker Brin, Park City
Meeting New Colleagues in Mexico, Beth Gulley, Olathe

Category: New Poets

First: Filling Up, Deborah Linn McNeemee, El Dorado

Second: A Day Cutting Firewood, John Joseph Brown, Lawrence

Third: Bones He Can’t Grow Back, Mark Landon Jarvis, El Dorado

Honorable Mentions:
Tribe of Dan, Joseph Zalewski, Manhattan
Christmas Morning Poem, Cynthia C. Schaker, El Dorado
CJ, Until We Meet Again, Cynthia C. Schaker, El Dorado

Catagory: Narrative Poetry

First: Diving Lesson, Kristine A. Polansky, Manhattan

Second: Rick Webb, Barber, Mark Landon Jarvis, El Dorado

Third: Time Travel, Julie A. Sellers, Atchison

HM: Old Sheldon: Here is Hope, Jeanice Eagan Davis, Clearwater

Category: Ekphrastic

First: Memento Volare, Julie Ann Baker Brin, Park City

Second: Here I Come, April Pameticky, Wichita

Third: Safe as Houses, Julie Ann Baker Brin, Park City

HM: Hesse and I Have Coffee, April Pameticky, Wichita

Kristine A. Polansky
​presented by Poetry Contest Manager, Janice Northerns

A local donor has offered the following challenge to Kansas Authors Club members. Every #ReadLocalKS submission to our website from now through December 1 will be entered into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate to Bookshop.org. ​

A local donor has offered the following challenge to Kansas Authors Club members. Every #ReadLocalKS submission to our website from now through December 1 will be entered into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate to Bookshop.org. ​

A local donor has offered the following challenge to Kansas Authors Club members. Every #ReadLocalKS submission to our website from now through December 1 will be entered into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate to Bookshop.org. ​

In Traci Brimhall’s latest poetry collection, LOVE PRODIGAL (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), she tackles topics such as the end of a marriage, the loss of her mother, the pandemic, and learning to live with chronic pain and illness. This list might lead you to think the book’s primary connective tissue is sadness and regret, but on the contrary (and as the title suggests), the poems are woven into a cohesive collection by love: love that is exuberant and celebratory, even as it acknowledges the messy business of heartbreak and death and pain. There are also pieces in the book about a new relationship, and these are—yes—love poems.

As she writes about darker topics, Brimhall leans into the pain for what it can teach her about herself. The lesson over and over is that she is worthy, she is strong, she is capable of self-love. In “Cold, Crazy, Broken,” she explores her mistreatment in a previous relationship: “I’m sorry I held his breath between / my horns until he explained me to myself, said cold / said crazy said broken …” By the end of the poem, she has reframed these insults with her own powerful meanings: “I became the story / of me—cold as mint, crazy as holding my shadow’s hand / broken as the night when the new moon rises through it.”

In “Why I Stayed,” the title implies remaining in a relationship, but the relationship it references is the speaker’s relationship with life. She writes “all summer I wanted // to die … Instead, I took 99 / of the peacock’s eyes, half the checking account, and left.” The explanation for staying comes in these closing lines: “I found // a thousand small pleasures that made me want to live, and / they were bridges, birdsong, strawberries, sunlight, and lambs.”

LOVE PRODIGAL is infused with these “small pleasures” that make it a delight to read. One of Brimhall’s many strengths as a writer is her ability to startle and stun with fresh, inventive language. I underlined so many gorgeous phrases and lines like these:

• “my heart // in its bone kennel” (“If You Want to Fall in Love Again”)
• “love is a syllabus of domestic chores with rolling due dates and extra-credit candlelight” (“Arts & Sciences”)
• “our bedroom window’s archive of light” (“Love Languages”)

I could list more examples, but they are best enjoyed within the context of the poems.

Brimhall’s work can be witty and playful with nods to pop culture (“I Would Do Anything for Love, but I Won’t” and “Long-Distance Relationship as Alt Text” ) as well as poems inspired by other poets, like “Someday I’ll Love Traci Brimhall” (after Ocean Vuong’s “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong”).

“Someday I’ll Love Traci Brimhall” encapsulates many of the themes in the book as she writes of accepting herself, her pain, and her family, including her mother. Her linguistic chops are also on full display: “I’ll boast ornament & scandal”; “I’ll crisis & satisfy”; “[I’ll] Unbutton / myself, let the shames scuttle out”; “I’ll bumble like a bee…”.

The hardest person to love is often oneself, and though the conceit of this poem describes her love for Traci Brimhall as “nearly” here, in truth, the book is studded with a clear acceptance and celebration of the poet’s self. Perhaps that is the secret to the joy spilling out of these pages.
​
I have loved Traci Brimhall (and her words) for about six years now, since I first read her poetry. Of her earlier books, COME THE SLUMBERLESS TO THE LAND OF NOD was my favorite, and as I awaited the publication of LOVE PRODIGAL, I wondered if this new book could measure up. I am happy to report that it does. If you, too, would like to love Traci Brimhall, it’s as easy as reading her poetry. #readlocalks

Member Janice Northerns shared this review of member Traci Brimhall's book, Love Prodigal.
​ 

What are you reading? Help us lift and share the good news about Kansas literature. Tag your book loves and reviews on social media with #ReadLocalKS and submit here to be posted on the Kansas Authors Club website. ​

Member Janice Northerns shares a review of member Michael Poage's Heart: Collected Poems 1975-2024.

HEART contains 14 books and spans almost 50 years, and it was wonderful to hear Mike read from it at Watermark Books recently! Here's my review of the book:

HEART: COLLECTED POEMS 1975-2024 by Michael Poage offers a rare opportunity to trace a poet’s evolution over time. Much of his work is spare and philosophical but still capable of profound impact, as in this early poem from BORN, his 1975 collection:

The First Person with Skin
The fog
she thought would cover
her bones
was only a tongue,
a door.

In these few short lines, Poage contrasts the expectation of protection with the discovery of vulnerability and openness. I enjoyed finding another poem much later in the book (from 2001’s GOD WON’T OVERLOOK US) that reminded me of “The First Person with Skin”:

Slipping Into Something Comfortable
She took off her clothes.
It was that simple.

In this later poem, the subject is at ease in her own skin. These pieces may seem only tangentially related, but one of the delights of reading Poage’s collected works is finding poems published many years apart that speak to one another—each enriched by the conversation. These pieces also illustrate the author’s knack for making his titles do much of the work; the titles are the key to understanding these two poems.

Poage’s poetry is lyrical but features plenty of concrete detail and vivid description, with poems set in varied locations, including Kansas, Bosnia (where he spends time teaching each year) and Gaza.

Two of my favorite pieces evoked radically different emotions. A poem late in the book, “a swarm of bees”, which is dedicated to George Floyd, chilled me to the bone. The poem is literally about a video of a swarm of bees, but the figurative meaning as we interpret it in the context of George’s Floyd’s tragic case resonates deeply. The bees are “moving barely enough / to notice.” But the speaker notices “the sound. a / grinding, slow business / cooking above your head.” From there the poem builds to a powerful and haunting conclusion.

Another favorite, “Loose Change” stirred happier feelings. The poem describes a coffee date in a book store between a woman and the poem’s speaker. The language is erotically charged throughout, from these early lines—“you came up behind me. / I felt the light touch / of your breasts through / your blouse and my shirt / against my back” to the closure: “you slipped your hands / into my front pants pockets. / You were not searching / for nickels or dimes.”

As might be expected in a collection that spans fifty years and includes fourteen books, these poems cover a wide range of subjects. There is much more to discover than I have mentioned here. Don’t be intimidated by the length of the book (900+ pages). You can start at the beginning and read the book chronologically, or you can dip in at any point and emerge with core samples from different eras of Michael Poage’s poetry. Both methods yield rich rewards.
#readlocalks

If you, like me, find yourself growing grumpier by the year, check out this memoir by my friend Tammy Hader!
WALKING OLD ROADS: A MEMOIR OF KINDNESS REDISCOVERED by Tammy Hader.

Tammy Hader structures this memoir around revisiting childhood memories in an attempt to find the cure for the cynicism that plagues many of us as we grow older. She describes growing up in the small town of Belle Plain, Kansas, and expresses longing for the past when neighbors and strangers seemed friendlier and more open to helping one another.

The book features a dual plot line as each short chapter focuses on a visit to her aging mother. Together, mother and daughter sort through old photographs and these often spark the memories that form the bulk of the book. In writing about the weekly visits to her mother, Hader also reflects on role reversal as she poignantly contrasts memories of her parents caring for her with the details of her new role: taking her mom to medical appointments, helping her with daily tasks, and offering comfort and reassurance.

The author recalls her childhood with details such as these, as she thinks about the five-and-dime store she and a friend visited often: “The store’s curious odor blended necessities and indulgences into a thick promise of discovery. …. Bubble gum and Milk Duds in hand, the creaky wood floor kept track of us until the door chime announced our departure.”
​
She also vividly describes her parents as newlyweds, captured in a short home movie that she finds at her Mom’s house: “Smartly attired in his Army uniform, Dad reached up to straighten his military-issue dress hat. There was no audio of Dad joking with his bride or Mom’s laughter, but I heard them anyway. Mom grabbed Dad’s hand ….. They climbed into their blue two-tone 1955 Pontiac and drove off in the direction of a new beginning.”
Readers will enjoy these glimpses of life in small-town Kansas, as well as Hader’s chronicle of her quest to rediscover the kindness she grew up with. Insights and reflections throughout the book are infused with dry humor, adding another layer to the memoir. The author’s examination of her changing relationship with her mother is just as interesting as her childhood recollections, and anyone who is in a similar stage of life will appreciate that aspect of WALKING OLD ROADS as well.
#readlocalks

Theme  “Words Take Flight, Choose Your Own Adventure” (27 entries)
 
1st Place:  “To The Blueberry-Picking Festival” by Gretchen Burch, D2

2ndPlace:  “middling paper” by April Pameticky, D5

3rd Place:  “Sitting With The Cottonwoods” by Kelly Johnston, D5

Honorable Mention:  “Firewatch” by Kelly Johnston, D5

Honorable Mention:  “Sometimes now, words escape me” by Iris E. Craver, D2

Free Verse (51 entries)
 
1st Place: “Sixteen” by Gretchen Burch, D2

2nd Place: “Scars” by Judy Oliver, D5

3rd Place: Home of the Brave(s) by Julie Ann Baker Brin, D5

Honorable Mention: “Ekphrastic Mother/ Daughter Collaboration” by K. L. Barron, writer (D4) and Shawnee Barron (photographer)

Honorable Mention: “Itty Bitty Bio” by Jean Grant, D2

Honorable Mention: “Leaving” by Brenda White, D2

Honorable Mention: “On Speaking with My Brother Who is Dying” by Jeanice Eagan Davis, D5

​Honorable Mention: “thursday in the shadow of kesoo” by April Pameticky, D5

Narrative (30 entries )
  
1st Place: “salt” by April Pameticky, D5

2nd Place: “High Plains Childhood: Spirits” by Janice Lee McClure, D7

3rd Place: “Eclipse” by Julie A. Sellers, D1

Honorable Mention: “you dreamed so hard it felt like permanence” by April Pameticky,  D5

Honorable Mention: “Planting” by Arlice W. Davenport, D5 

Honorable Mention: “Kansas is Burning” by Jeanice Eagan Davis, D5 

​Honorable Mention” “Fossils” by Kelly Johnston, D5

Classic Forms, 10 entries
 
1st Place: “Ghost” by Janice Lee McClure, D7

2nd Place: “Frozen Rain” by Janice Lee McClure, D7

3rd Place: “Wild At Heart” by Janice Lee McClure, D7

​No HMs

New Poets, 18 entries
 
1st Place: “Music Lessons” by Gretchen Burch, D2

2nd Place: “Sick as Dogs” by Samantha L. Barrett, D5

3rd Place: “Circus” by Gretchen Burch, D2

Honorable Mention: “Permission” by Gretchen Burch, D2

​Honorable Mention: “Polka Dots” by Cynthia Schaker, D5

Whimsy, 28 entries
 
1st Place: “Rebel with a Cause” by Janice Lee McClure, D5

2nd Place: “The King at the Door” by Arlice W. Davenport, D5

3rd Place: “Vultures” by Kristine A. Polansky, D4

Honorable Mention:  “Dog in the Sun” by Arlice W. Davenport, D5

​Honorable Mention:  “What a Maroon!” by Arlice W. Davenport, D5

Japanese Forms, 15 entries
  
1st Place: “Oh, Sweet Canada” by Kristine A. Polansky, D4

2nd Place: “Swept” by Julie Ann Baker Brin, D5

3rd Place: “Mountain Haiku” by Jeanice Eagan Davis, D5

Honorable Mention: “Summer Night” by Aimee L. Gross, D1

​Honorable Mention: “Mists Silence the Trees” by Kristine A. Polansky, D4

 Rural voices, 32 entries
 
1st place: "What I Hate About Living in the Country" by Gretchen Burch, D2

2nd place: "Hay Work" by Tim Keane, D4

3rd place: "Turning 7 in March" by Ashley Clayton Kay, D2

Honorable mention: "High Plains Childhood: Summer" by Janice Lee McClure, D7

​Honorable mention: "Sledding in the Flatlands” by Jeanice Eagan Davis, D5

Poetry Chapbook Contest, 3 entries
 
1st, Published chapbook: Picking Fights in Book Club by Beth Gulley, D2
 
1st, Craft chapbook: faux pas: goofs, gaffes & other blunders by Martha Wherry, D5

Come support several Kansas Authors Club members and indie authors as well as one of Kansas's newest independent bookstores for Red Fern Booksellers' first author fair! It will be held October 1 from 5-7 PM at Red Fern Booksellers,106 S Santa Fe, Salina KS 67401.

Per Red Fern Booksellers:

Join us for our inaugural local authors' fair! On October 1st, from 5-7pm, we'll be celebrating the talents of local authors. Eight distinguished authors will be present to engage with visitors and autograph their books. The event will showcase a variety of genres, including Romance, Poetry, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, General Fiction, and Short Stories.

Meet our featured authors: Chloe Chun Seim, Angel Edenburn, Sandra Patterson-Slaydon, Jillian Forsberg, Kimberly Grymes, Janice Northerns, Cat Webling, and Don Meyer. Don't miss the chance to converse with these creative minds.

Theme Contest - 27 entries
Judge: Amy Sage Webb Baza

1st - [there she is], by Ashley Clayton Kay
2nd - How to Write a Poem, by Arlice W. Davenport
3rd - Once You Have Rounded the Sun, by Arlice W. Davenport
HM - To Tim, by Brenda White
HM - Aubade: Trying to Decide the Kind of Poet She'll Become, by Laura Lee Washburn
​

Free Verse - 68 entries
Judge: George Franklin

1st - Why Blue Eyes Cry, by Janice Northerns
2nd - Ever Topeka, by Ruth Maus
3rd - The Wilding of Cynthia Ann Parker, by Janice Northerns
HM - Mike London's, by Janice Lee McClure
HM - You Are Not Diminished, by Janice Northerns
​

Classical Poetry - 15 entries
Judge: Jeanine Hathaway

1st - Some Things Can't Be Taken Back, by Kristine A. Polansky
2nd - Great-Great-Grandma and the Kitchen Wall, by Kristine A. Polansky
3rd - To the Stars, by Janice Lee McClure

​

Japanese Forms - 14 entries
Judge: David Romanda

1st - Cottonwood Seeds Land, by Ashley Clayton Kay
2nd - Railroaded, by Julie Ann Baker Brin
3rd - Pick-Up Sticks, by Iris E. Craver
HM - Prairie Wind, by Perry L. Shepard
HM - lavender splashes, by Duane R. Johnson

​​

Narrative Poetry - 29 entries
Judge: Aida Dziho-Sator

1st - Trout Valley, W.Va., March 31, 1886, a found poem from family letters, by Roland Sodowsky
2nd - His Gentle Hands, by Cynthia J. Ross
3rd - Prairie Return, by Linda Beth Wilson

​

Whimsy - 26 entries
Judge: David Romanda

1st - Renaming Yoga Poses for Greater Accuracy, by Julie Ann Baker Brin
2nd - What am I made of? by Julie Ann Baker Brin
3rd - Slicing a Cantaloupe, by Janice Northerns
HM - Prescribe, by Julie Ann Baker Brin
HM - ​Manypaws, by Janice Lee McClure
​

Performance Poetry - 8 entries
Judge: Avery A. Marshall

1st - The Music of You, by Ronda Miller
2nd - Money, Money, Money, by Amanda Little
3rd - Prairie Song, by Mary Powell
HM - Full Moon at Noon, by Mary Powell
HM - Reason to Call, by Duane R. Johnson

New Poets
Judge: Ed Harkness

1st - Death, by Madison Morrill
2nd - The Laundry Brigade Marches On, by Heather G. Taylor
​3rd - Death Warps Time, by S.L. Brown

Rural Voices - 30 entries
Judge: Sam Jack

1st - April 11, Again, by Laura Lee Washburn
2nd - Redneck Tornado, by Kelly Johnston
3rd - Wash House Memories, by Aimee L. Gross
HM - Mesquite and God, by Roland Sodowsky
HM - Landmarks, by Linda Ahrens-Brower
​

Chapbooks - 11 entries
Judge: Sam Jack


Published Chapbooks
1st - Since Corona Ruined Our Trip to the Library, by Beth Gulley
2nd - Nurdles and Other Poems, by Allison deFreese


Craft Chapbooks
1st - Neighborhood Crazies, by Martha Wherry
2nd - A Common Yearning, by Cammie Funston
3rd - Skysong, by Julie A. Sellers
HM - Unfolding, by Iris E. Craver

Are you ready to up your writing game and increase your exposure as an author? The publication market for poetry book reviews is surprisingly easy to break into! Writing reviews offers many benefits for you as the reviewer: publication credits, resume building, increased exposure and networking opportunities, and a deeper reading experience and appreciation for poetry. Reviewing books is also good literary citizenship. This presentation will cover the basics of what to include in a poetry book review and how to structure it, tips for taking notes while reading the book to simplify the reviewing process, and how to use published reviews to increase exposure as a writer. I’ll also discuss strategies for choosing books to review and matching reviews with appropriate markets, the pros and cons of including negative information, and how to share published reviews on the free site Goodreads to increase exposure. Attendees will receive a resources handout that includes a list of paying and nonpaying book review markets.

Janice Northerns of Liberal (D-7) is the author of Some Electric Hum, 2021 winner of the KAC Nelson Poetry Book Award,  the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award from the University of Kansas, and  a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. Her poetry has been widely published, and her book reviews have been published in journals such as The Rumpus and The Rupture. The author grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Tech University, where she received the Robert S. Newton Creative Writing Award. Other honors include a Brush Creek Foundation writing residency, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and numerous awards for individual poems. She and her husband have lived in Liberal since 1998. When not writing, Janice enjoys dog walks, cooking, and kayaking.

Janice Northerns (D7) of Liberal is featured in the latest podcast by Fall for the Book, produced by George Mason University in Virginia. Hosts Suzy Rigby and Kara Oakley interview Janice about the landscape and its influence on her writing, balancing teaching and writing, and more.  Janice also shares a couple of poems from her book and discusses inspiration for her second poetry collection, currently in progress.

​Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the 2021 KAC Nelson Poetry Book Award, the KU Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award, and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. Her work has been widely published in literary journals, and she recently won the River Heron Review Editors’ Prize for her poem, “The Bleeding Edge.” Click on the link below to listen to the podcast:
 
https://soundcloud.com/user-806669177/fallforthebook_janicenortherns

Whether you are new to ekphrasis or an old hand at it, the practice can offer both a concrete anchor to start a piece as well as a sail to push your writing in a new direction. Janice Northerns will read several ekphrastic poems from her award-winning collection Some Electric Hum and share tips to help you take ekphrastic writing to the next level. The discussion will be geared toward prose writers as well as poets.

​Optional: Those who plan to attend are invited to write ahead of time a poem or flash prose piece responding to the painting “Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed” by Vincent Van Gogh (1887). You can view the painting at this museum link:
https://krollermuller.nl/en/vincent-van-gogh-four-sunflowers-gone-to-seed-1

Janice Northerns, of Liberal, is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the 2021 KAC Nelson Poetry Book Award, the KU Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award, and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Tech University, where she received the Robert S. Newton Award for Creative Writing. Her work has been widely published in literary journals. Honors include a Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts residency, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship, and numerous awards for individual poems. Janice and her husband moved to Liberal in 1998, where she taught English at Seward County Community College before retiring in 2019 to write full-time. The landscapes and people of West Texas and southwest Kansas are a steady source of inspiration for her poetry.
 
 
 
Book Description:
 “Some Electric Hum reads … like a treatise on the ways communities are crafted by wanting, having, and then letting go. … This book exemplifies her skill in giving language to those fragile and ephemeral experiences of connection, as well as her determination to understand how connection might be felt in the barely perceptible hum of a completed circuit, closed but still alive with alternating electric currents.”
— Dr. Sandra Cox, judge for the Nelson Poetry Book Award
 

Janice Northerns (D-7), of Liberal, will read several poems, including “The Bleeding Edge,” winner of the 2021 River Heron Review Editors’ Prize, at a Zoom poetry reading at 6 p.m. (CST) Mar. 10, 2022. Janice is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the 2021 KAC Nelson Poetry Book Award, the KU Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award, and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry.

The poetry reading is sponsored by River Heron Review and will also include the four finalists in the contest. The Zoom event is free and open to the public, but you must register AHEAD OF TIME to receive the meeting information and password.

Click HERE to register.

Saturday, January 15, 2022, starting at 10:00am

District 2 Monthly Meeting - Members of any district are welcome to attend.

Janice Northerns of Liberal (D7) has a new flash CNF piece in Scrawl Place, a journal focusing on writing about place. Janice is the author of Some Electric Hum, 2021 winner of the KAC Nelson Poetry Book Award and the KU Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award.

​Read her nonfiction piece here. 

There were several nominees this year that made excellent use of visual art alongside their original verse, and I was charmed enough by each of them that I struggled to put them in a comparable context with works that did not include a visual antecedent for the poetry. The engaging and immediate doodles that illustrate Ruth Maus's Valentine and the historicizations that Mark Scheel offers as paratext for Joseph Maino’s photographs in Star Chaser were both enchanting, but I think the most impressive entrant from this subgenre of poetry was by Robert L. Dean, Jr. I found the intertextual ekphrastic play between Dean’s poems and Steven Schroeder’s watercolors in The Aerialist Will Not Be Performing worked to emphasize the elastic exchange of aesthetic impressions that the images create as context for the poems. I was delighted to find references to REM peppered alongside allusions to Homeric verse, both given equal weight as vehicles for transtextual poetic maneuvers managed with aplomb. 
 
In spite of how impressed I was with that book, I ultimately decided that I must use the verse alone as a means of adjudication. In an effort to decide using that criterion, I noted that three poets in particular—Brian Daldorph, Michael Poage, and Janice Northerns—made use of intricate formal structures for some of their poems but also included poetry that felt highly naturalistic, improvisational, or even overheard. All three poets somehow made at least two disparate modes of narrative verse fit easily into their three respective volumes, and since the Nelson prize is for a book rather than a single poem, I thought I ought weigh the poetry within each volume in terms of how it functions as a unified whole. 
 
Daldorph’s sequencing of Kansas Poems worked beautifully a means by which to evoke the cycles of seasons and human lives; those cycles are woven into the content of poetry, whether rendered individually in bursts of uncomfortable confession, as in “The Football Coach’s Wife,” or colloquially, as is the case for mundane childhood remembrances or even for lists, as in “Laurel Avenue,” that all feel strangely profound in spite of their everyday qualities. Each poem is a small textured fragment given meaning by its place in a larger mosaic that creates an image of Kansas as both a landscape and a cultural context for the residual agrarian rhythms that still shape the early 20th Century.
 
Likewise, the narrative voice in Poage’s You Must Have Your Famine is less varied than the speakers who make up Daldorph's polyphonic mosaic, but the form of Poage’s poetry shifts from the controlled and neoclassical (perhaps most obviously on display in “Scottish Sonnet”) to the conversational and postmodern (“Affection,” for instance, seems as much a review of Lahiri’s The Lowlands as a musing on what love looks like from the outside). As the going-away and coming-home of the poems’ speaker pushes readers away and then pulls them close by turns, the mode of address moves from proud to vulnerable and back around by way of shame and delight, which is surely an achievement of narrative suture owed to the poet’s great skill.
 
In spite of the achievements I’ve noted in Maus, Scheel, Dean, Daldorph and Poage’s collections, I think my favorite of the nominated books is Some Electric Hum. Like Daldorph, Northerns excels at embedding a depth of characterization in an abbreviated sketch of her poem’s speakers, some of whom seem to confess or extemporize in direct address to her readers. Not all the narrative poems function this way; some of the speakers are spied upon from around hospital corners or just-glimpsed in family histories told by distant cousins to readers who find themselves embarrassed witnesses of private dramas and secret tragedies. Northern crafts tender portraits of women held hostage by desire, imagining them in a kind of atemporal community, grappling together with transgenerational trauma and pedestrian misogyny. The poems “Boys Would Come on Horses,” “Zinnia Women,” and “Mother-daughter Dresses” fit together like a puzzle, and their shared thematic content sets up a series of formal poems about marriage in the final section of the volume. This section also achieves the combination of craft with innovation that was so apparent in Poage’s verse; Northerns includes a modified sestina about what holds married people together, a fourteener-ballad about how sometimes marriages fall apart anyway, and an open-verse musing on what it means to watch a once-dear loved one slowly pass away. Whether considering family, motherhood or romantic connections, Some Electric Hum reads to me like a treatise on the ways communities are crafted by wanting, having, and then letting go. Perhaps this year more than any other, readers may wish to consider how desire, possession and loss might become meaningful if understood as necessary preconditions for human connectedness. Janice Northerns uses her poetry to explore how wanting, needing, and even withholding are the practices by which families are forged, maintained, and, when necessary, broken. This book exemplifies her skill in giving language to those fragile and ephemeral experiences of connection, as well as her determination to understand how connection might be felt in the barely perceptible hum of a completed circuit, closed but still alive with alternating electric currents. For this reason, I feel that her work is most deserving of this year's Nelson Award and I congratulate her on the achievement. 
 
All best,
Dr. Sandra Cox

​Janice Northerns of Liberal (District 7) has been named a 2021 WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry for her book Some Electric Hum (Lamar University Literary Press, 2020). The award, named after Pulitzer Prize winning author Willa Cather, recognizes the best literature featuring women’s or girls’ stories set in the North American West. Women Writing the West (WWW), a nonprofit association, underwrites and presents the nationally recognized award annually at the WWW Fall Conference. A winner and two finalists in eight categories were selected by a panel of professional librarians, historians, and university-affiliated educators.
 
“I am thrilled and grateful to be honored by such a prestigious organization,” Northerns said. “Publishing my first poetry collection last year was a long-held dream, and for Some Electric Hum to win an award makes it even more meaningful.”
 
Some Electric Hum is available for purchase from all major online retailers. Signed copies are available through her website at www.janicenortherns.com or by emailing Northerns directly.