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Member Jim Gilkeson will host a book event in Emporia at Middle Ground Books on Feb. 22nd at 3:00 p.m. He will be reading from Three Lost Worlds, which received last year's Coffin Memorial Book Award for nonfiction, as well as more recent writing. It would be wonderful to see you there!   "Kansas is everywhere." -Jim Gilkeson I raced through, The Eleven Directions of Kansas by Jim Gilkeson this weekend. These well-written memoir-vignettes take the reader on a journey from Kansas to Germany to Scotland and places in between. From funny to poignant to just downright entertaining, each little essay will make you think about life and all the directions it takes you. --Lindsey Bartlett, Emporia #ReadLocalKS 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.
The recording of the January program is now available for viewing by members at this link. (Member sign-on required.) This video will also remain publicly available on our YouTube channel. Our next program will be on Saturday, February 15, starting at 1:30 p.m. The presenter will be Mary-Lane Kamberg talking about Grand Openings.
January 18, 2025 - 1:30 p.m. 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  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.  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 We are working on an amazing lineup of state programs in 2025! Click here to check on our progress and SAVE THE DATES on your calendar!
Three Lost Worldsby Jim Gilkeson 
 Jim Gilkeson and Lindsey Bartlett The J. Donald Coffin Memorial Book Award was established by Mrs. Bertha Coffin to honor the memory of her husband, a long-time member and officer of KAC, after his death on September 6, 1978. The J. Donald Coffin Award is intended to honor the best published book written by a member of Kansas Authors Club, excluding Kansas history, Kansas memoir, poetry, and children’s books, which have their own contests. Beginning in 2022, this contest provides two awards, one in fiction and one in nonfiction.
 Eleven Directions explores what must be one of the world’s quirkiest lessons in orienteering, which perhaps explains how Gilkeson negotiated the real-life experiences that made these stories possible. Questions abound: What’s behind the mystery of his father’s missing uvula? Are these stories real or fictional? Are they memoirs with more than a few embellishments? It hardly matters because they hold the power to entertain and even enlighten us, the way good stories should. The titles of Gilkeson’s narratives by themselves lure us in. Where, exactly, is Topeka on the Danube, and who are the members of The Green Tea Cult? Who are Ms. Transylvania and Mr. Haircut? All of these stories deliver wonderful reading experiences. Gilkeson’s narrative voice creates the illusion that he’s right there with us, enjoying our pleasure in the stories he tells.  Publication: 1 September, 2024 Published by Tenacity Press Edited by Denise Low and Hal Zina Bennett $15.95, Paperback ISBN: 978-1-892193-02-5 For media inquiries and review copies: Email: [email protected]. Web: www.jimgilkeson.com Phone: (707) 696-2768     Jim Gilkeson was born in Wichita, Kansas, and attended the University of Kansas until 1971. Gilkeson's books are Three Lost Worlds: A Memoir of Life Among Mystics, Healers, and Life-Artists (Mammoth Publications), A Pilgrim in Your Body, and Energy Healing: A Pathway to Inner Growth. His stories and articles have appeared in The Memoirist Quarterly, 105 Meadowlark Reader, Massage and Bodywork Magazine, and The Heart of Healing, edited by Dawson Church.
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