Current News from the Kansas Authors Club

Meet us at the Kansas Book Festival!

9/18/2025

We’re excited to have you join us for the 14th annual Kansas Book Festival on Saturday, September 20, 2025, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Washburn University in Topeka!
This free, public celebration will feature 45+ authors—including Bill Kurtis, Bryn Greenwood, and Kevin Young—plus children’s activities, live entertainment, book sales, and food trucks.
Stop by the Kansas Authors Club table! We look forward to meeting you!

Kansas Book Festival

Kansas Book Festival: Saturday, September 20, 2025

8/25/2025

Mark your calendar for the 2025 Kansas Book Festival on Saturday, September 20! We’re thrilled to welcome 45 Kansas-connected authors, including New York Times bestseller Ben Lerner, media legend Bill Kurtis, suspense novelist Bryn Greenwood, and Kevin Young, poetry editor of The New Yorker. You'll also hear from Lesa Cline-Ransome, a celebrated children’s author, and Traci Brimhall, Kansas Poet Laureate—plus explore everything from prairie rivers to historical crime.

Since our start in 2010, the Festival has grown from 900 to 1,650 attendees and now reaches more than 450 school kids each year.

Kansas Book Festival

Members Ruth Maus and Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg to be Panelists at 2025 Kansas Book Festival

5/7/2025

This news items is shared from the website of member Ruth Maus. Click here to follow Ruth and sign up for updates.

I know you're all familiar with the Kansas Book Festival held at Washburn University. This year it will be on Saturday, September 20th, so save the date!

I've been asked to be a panelist there at the 9:00 a.m. panel discussion Ad Astra: Emergencies, Emergences and Restorations, with top-notch memoir authors Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and Dr. Craig Yorke as we discuss struggles and "to the stars with difficulty." Because our three books contain plenty of "difficulty." This is a huge honor for me. Thank you, KBF organizers!

Caryn’s book The Magic Eye depicts her struggle with a rare eye cancer, coupled with prairie restoration and wildlife refuge, moving toward surviving the personal emergency and the emergency of our environment.

Craig’s book, subtitled Steep, A Black Neurosurgeon’s Journey, depicts the strict expectations that he will be an honor to his race, his difficult training in medicine, his coming to Topeka (at first working at Menninger), the emergencies he attended to in performing complicated brain surgery, and then his coming to peace with the steep price he has paid. His retirement includes being on the board of The Children’s Discovery Center as it was founded and developed, and he and his wife Mary created a prairie on the center’s land in Gage Park.

My novel Lunacy And Acts of God, though not a memoir, also takes place in Kansas. My young narrator is trying to understand a confusing world of race relations, religion, picketers, and mental illness in 1950s Topeka, as well as survive a blizzard and being struck by lightning, (because we all know about Kansas weather!) and make peace with her chaotic life.

I hope you can join us on September 20th for Ad Astra: Emergencies, Emergences and Restorations and what's sure to be a great conversation about struggles and successes.

Website of Ruth Maus

Kansas Book Festival

Sneak-Peek Event: Kansas Book Festival

3/10/2025

Dear Festival Friend,

We are inviting you to a special Sneak-Peek event on Thursday, April 10. If you join us, you will enjoy live jazz, drinks, and hors d'oeuvres, and you'll get to hear from acclaimed Kansas City author Candice Millard, whose rousing history books have climbed into the NYTimes Bestseller list repeatedly. You will also get to hear from five authors slated to speak at the 2025 Festival (September 20), who will share tantalizing snippets from their writing. Festival authors will be conversation partners, and you can bid on rare books, such as a signed copy of Robert Frost's poetry. A set of signed books by Candice will be raffled too, and books will be available for purchase from Kansas presses.

Please help us grow our Friends of the Festival by joining us from 7-8:30 pm on April 10 at the Parish Hall of Grace Episcopal Cathedral in Topeka (701 SW 8th Ave.). Individual tickets cost $35, or you can donate further by bringing a table of friends (i.e., six guests joined by a Sneak-Peek author for $500).

Click here to buy tickets, and we hope to see you for an evening of entertainment and meaningful, book-loving conversation.

Thanks on behalf of the Board of the Kansas Book Festival,

Tim Bascom (Executive Director) and Kathleen O’Leary Morgan (Chair of the Board)

Kansas Book Festival Website

Save the Date:
Saturday, September 20, 2025
9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Washburn University Library

Save the date! Kansas Book Festival

4/3/2024

Please note that individual authors should wait for email approval before sending in payment.

Exhibitor Registration

Kansas Book Festival - Saturday, September 16, 2023

9/6/2023

Kansas Authors Club and many of our members will be at the Kansas Book Festival on Saturday, September 16. We would love to see you there! Join us for a day of literary festivities, including the Kansas Authors Club Youth Contest Awards Ceremony, which will take place at 2:00pm in the Mabee Library Lounge. We are excited to celebrate our young writers in Topeka this year!

Members presenting at the festival this year include Janice Northerns, K.L. Barron, Jenn Bailey, Barbara Waterman-Peters, Julie A. Sellers, Traci Brimhall, Maryfrances Wagner, Maureen Carroll, Brian Daldorph, Marcia Cebulska, and many, many more!

Join us!

All youth award winners will receive a copy of the 2023 awards book, courtesy of POD Print, Wichita. The book includes 1st, 2nd, 3rd place, and honorable mention entries.

POD Print

Save the Date: The Kansas Book Festival Takes place on Saturday, September 16, at Washburn University in Topeka

7/17/2023

On Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023, the 12th annual Kansas Book Festival will take place at Washburn University, hosted by the Mabee Library.

The 2023 Festival will bring an amazing line up of 50 authors. Their presentations cover fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s fiction. The festival will also feature outdoor performances, a book-art exhibit, food trucks, and exhibitor tents with 35 publishers, nonprofits, and individual authors.

This year, the headliner is Ling Ma, author of the new collection of short stories Bliss Montage, which won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award, plus Severance, named a Best Book of the Year by NPR as well as one of the “Books We Loved” at the New Yorker. Other featured authors...

... read the rest at KansasBookFestival.com.

Note: Kansas Authors Club will have an informational table, but members who wish to display and sell their own books at the festival will need to reserve individual author tables.

Exhibitor Information

Meet us at the Kansas Book Festival!

Kansas Book Festival: Saturday, September 20, 2025

Members Ruth Maus and Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg to be Panelists at 2025 Kansas Book Festival

Sneak-Peek Event: Kansas Book Festival

Save the date! Kansas Book Festival

Kansas Book Festival - Saturday, September 16, 2023

Save the Date: The Kansas Book Festival Takes place on Saturday, September 16, at Washburn University in Topeka

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