Ellen Plumb’s City Bookstore, 1122 Commercial, Emporia, Kansas, will host seven award-winning authors during the Halfway To Everywhere Festival.
11:00 am — Hazel Hart, author of the meticulously researched historical fiction series, A Pierce Family Saga, set in the Kansas Territory of 1855.
11:45 am — Miranda Asebedo, author of 2019 Kansas Notable Book THE DEEPEST ROOTS (HarperTeen, 2018) and the upcoming A CONSTELLATION OF STARS (HarperTeen, Nov. 5, 2019). Cottonwood Hollow, Kansas, is a strange place. For the past century, every girl has been born with a special talent, like the ability to fix any object, heal any wound, or find what is missing.
12:30 pm — C.J. Janovy, author of 2019 Kansas Notable Book Award winner NO PLACE LIKE HOME: LESSONS IN ACTIVISM FROM LBGT KANSAS (University Press of Kansas, 2018). Kansas stands at the very center of American stereotypes about red states. In the American imagination, it is a place LGBT people leave. Janovy tells us why they stay in this epic story of how a few disorganized and politically naive Kansans, realizing they were under attack, rolled up their sleeves, went looking for fights, and ended up making friends in one of the country’s most hostile states.
2:00 pm — Huascar Medina, 2019-21 Poet Laureate of Kansas. In his role as Poet Laureate, Medina will promote the humanities as a resource for all Kansans through public presentations and discussions about poetry in communities across the state. Medina is a Topekan, Latino, a writer, and a performer. He calls himself a helianthus — a type of sunflower that has planted a seed in Kansas, taken root, and is now blooming.
2:45 pm — George Frazier is the author of 2018 Kansas Notable Book Award winner THE LAST WILD PLACES OF KANSAS (University Press of Kansas, 2018). Frazier also received the Midwest Book Award, the Hamlin Garland Prize, and the Ferguson Book Award. Since the last wild bison found refuge on the back of a nickel, the public image of natural Kansas has progressed from Great American Desert to dust bowl to flyover country. But look a little harder Frazier suggests, and you can find the last places where tenacious stretches of prairie, forest, and wetland cheat death and incubate the DNA of lost, wild America.
3:15 pm — Max McCoy is the author of four original Indiana Jones adventures for Lucasfilms, a Western Writers of America Spur Award winner, and is a multiple Kansas Notable Book Award winner, most recently in 2019 for ELEVATIONS: A PERSONAL EXPLORATION OF THE ARKANSAS RIVER (University Press of Kansas, 2018). Additionally, ELEVATIONS was named Best Cultural West Book of 2018 by True West magazine and winner of the National Outdoor Book Award in 2018.
4:15 pm — Kevin Rabas, Kansas Poet Laureate Emeritus, chairs the Department of English, Modern Languages, and Journalism at Emporia State University. He has written eleven books, including Kansas Notable Book and Nelson Poetry Book Award winner LISA’S FLYING ELECTRIC PIANO (Woodley Press, 2009). His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize six times. Rabas’s plays have been produced across Kansas and on both coasts.
Leave a Reply