Poem

Johnson County Library is pleased to announce that David Lee Garrison has won the open category of our writing contest on the theme of BREAKING FREE with "Putting Killers Away".

Dr. David Lee Garrison (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University) taught Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Kansas in 1978-79, and then at Wright State University until his retirement in 2009. He and his wife, Suzanne Kelly-Garrison, have residences in Oakwood, Ohio, and in Prairie Village, dividing their time between the two cities. Almost all of Suzanne’s family lives in Kansas; David has a cousin in Grandview

Johnson County Library and The Writers Place are pleased to announce that Kaleah Petersen has won the open category of our writing contest on the theme of TIME with "A Matter of Time".

Kaleah Petersen is in eighth grade at Indian Woods Middle School and is taking a Creative Writing class. She enjoys writing poetry and fiction in her free time.

A Matter of Time
Time is precious
You always think
That you have more
Until
The only ticking you hear
Is your dying heart
Counting down
The final seconds of life
And every minute
Every second
Of your entire life
Flashes before

The Readers Advisory committee is pleased to announce that Lisa Allen has won our Ain't It the Truth writing contest in the open category for her poem "Adoration."  With precise yet smoldering language, Allen's narrator carefully unravels the "secret histories" of the women who raised her--what remains hidden beneath the facades they were forced to adopt to survive.

Allen's choice of perspective allows readers to put themselves in the narrator's shoes and imagine the inner-workings of the matriarchs in their own lives.  "Adoration"'s truth doesn't come from absolute fact as much as lived