Jo McDougall will read her poetry at Johnson County Library on Tuesday June 21st at 6pm. Poetry and Prose is presented by the Writers Place and Johnson County Library.
Just when I thought I was done with the “bought a farm and moved to the country” genre, along comes Goat Song. Brad Kessler’s book is certainly about buying a farm and moving to the country. It’s also about learning to raise dairy goats. And even a little bit about making cheese.
But really, it’s song in itself--a sweet melody about harmony and how Kessler has managed to find it.
The Read Local committee is very pleased to announce Jemshed Khan has won our Bear Witness poetry contest for his poem "#48689." Entries included an impressive variety of poetic forms, including haiku and sonnet, making the selection very difficult. In the end, we selected "#48689" as, like the numbers in the title, it tattooed itself on our minds. The haunting imagery and vivid description lends the poem personal immediacy and requires remembrance.
Miller’s Valley is a coming of age novel about Mimi Miller, a girl growing up in the 1960s in rural Pennsylvania. Mimi and her family live on the same farm their family has lived on contentedly for generations. But things in Miller's Valley are beginning to change. Mimi’s dad is a farmer, but he’s really the fix-it man for the entire town. Mimi’s mom is a nurse who still manages to be around to raise Mimi and her two brothers.
Robert Benson always takes the question of “how to write a book” very seriously. For he was once "in the same spot and grateful for any help that might move [him] along . . . Sharing the things [he] knows about how a person goes about telling his story seems only right. Perhaps it is even, as the old prayer book says, a good and joyful thing.” He’s the perfect mentor to help nudge a new writer on her way.
At 18, Andi Alpers has lost her will to live. Her brother Truman has died, her father has deserted the family and is putting her mother in a mental hospital. In Paris, where her father is working on a project on King Louis-Charles, Andi vows to make their three-week visit a misery. But when she finds a journal that might hold the missing key to Louis-Charles history, she completely forgets about everything, including her senior thesis, and focuses instead on solving the mystery of his death.
Furiously Happy is a second memoir by Jenny Lawson, and she's just as outspoken, insightful and full of profanity as in the hysterically funny Let's Pretend This Never Happened (a Mostly True Memoir).
As we anticipate the chance to read Allie, First at Last, the just-released second middle-grade novel from Shawnee resident Angela Cervantes, we're reminded that Gaby, Lost and Found, her debut effort a couple of years ago, was much lauded and won multiple awards.
