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Monday, March 18, 2024

Congratulations, Alicia Rebecca Myers, 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize Winner!

We are overjoyed to announce the winner of the 
2024 Birdy Poetry Prize, Warble by Alicia Rebecca Myers


Congratulations, Alicia!



ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Alicia Rebecca Myers is a poet and essayist who holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Writing Fellow. Her writing has appeared in publications that include Best New Poets, Creative Nonfiction, FIELD, River Styx, Gulf Coast, SWWIM, december, Threadcount, and The Rumpus. Her chapbook of poems, My Seaborgium (Brain Mill Press, 2015), was selected by Kiki Petrosino as winner of the inaugural Mineral Point Chapbook Series, and she has been the recipient of a Kimmel Harding Nelson residency for poetry and a Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference nonfiction scholarship. Warble is her first full-length book.



We would also like to extend a hearty congratulations to our Birdy finalists and semi-finalists!



Meadowlark would like to thank Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg for serving as this year's judge.

Here, you can watch the recording of the announcement event, including readings from 2021-2014 winners: Alison Hicks (Knowing Is a Branching Trail), Jonathan Greenhause (Cupping Our Palms), Zachary Lundgren (Turkey Vulture), and Alicia Rebecca Myers (Warble)! Also included are comments on what Caryn found so alluring about Warble. Thank you to all who attended the event and made it a special, celebratory evening!



Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Welcome to Kennedy Eyberg, Spring 2024 Intern from Emporia State University

We are very pleased to have Kennedy Eyberg on the Meadowlark team this semester.

Kennedy is originally from Coon Rapids, Iowa, but moved to Kansas at the age of eight. She now lives in Shawnee, Kansas, and is a senior studying at Emporia State University as an English major with a minor in Creative Writing. Kennedy loves reading, writing, and biking in her free time, as well as playing her clarinet and guitar when she is home. She is big on hanging out with family whenever she gets the chance to see them, as well as her wonderful puppies, Oreo and Autumn. Kennedy hopes to work in publishing as an editor once she graduates.



Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Limited Edition: The Adventures of Bottle Calf



This is a Limited Edition, Hard Cover, 9x9 book, that will be numbered and signed by the Author & Illustrator.

The Adventures of Bottle Calf
Written by Ann Vigola Anderson
Art by Sara Long
ISBN: 978-1-956578-47-8 (hardcover)
Retail: $28.99

JUVENILE FICTION / Animals / Cows
JUVENILE FICTION / Animals / Farm Animals
JUVENILE FICTION / Family / Multigenerational

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!

32 Pages - full color illustrations


Ann Vigola Anderson & Sara Long

Ann Vigola Anderson writes heartwarming stories of her childhood in the 50s and 60s and of her experiences on her grandparents’ far. She shares the joys of an ordinary life and how she has taken on life’s challenges.
 
Sara Long spent the summers of her youth working on her family’s cattle ranches. She enjoys painting horses, cattle, and all other animals that might have crossed her path.

Tuesday, November 7, 2023

Now Available in the Meadowlark Bookstore

Our Mothers' Ghosts and Other Stories

by Marilyn Hope Lake

Retail: Paperback $19.99, hardcover $29.99

FICTION / Women
FICTION / Feminist
FICTION / Short Stories (single author)
FICTION / Historical / General

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.
 

What Reviewers are Saying:

Set in Illinois and Missouri river towns and cities from the early to late twentieth century, these plainspoken stories resurrect the past in all its glorious particulars, without sanctifying or sentimentalizing a mixed heritage of familial love and abuse. It’s all here: romance, rape, domestic violence, segregation, integration, the sexual revolution, political upheaval, and each generation’s backlash against the excesses of the last. Our Mothers’ Ghosts revolves around two archetypal sisters, and Lake takes great relish in revealing the dark impulses of the golden girl Helen and the disruptive innocence of the black sheep Boots. Amid the palpable pleasures of the book’s rich historical detail, there is always the shock of something blunt and honest and new.
—Trudy Lewis, author of The Empire Rolls
 
Marilyn Hope Lake’s work is very impressive. Lake’s tender prose transports the reader to an earlier, yet not-so-simple time, that reminds us of our past and guides us to a more hopeful future. Her stories have an effect you may have seen in a classic film, beginning with an evocative black and white photograph that suddenly blooms in full, technicolor glory as the narrative springs to life.
—Daren Dean, author of Far Beyond the Pale and Black Harvest
 
Our Mothers’ Ghosts is a wonderful collection of interconnected short stories that gains in complexity with each story, creating a rich portrait of work and women in twentieth-century America.
Steve Wiegenstein, Author, Scattered Lights, Slant of Light, This Old World, and The Language of Trees

Marilyn Hope Lake writes short fiction, poetry, plays, and children’s picture books. Lake has won many awards for her writing, including First Place in the 2011 Doris Mueller Poetry and Prose Contest for children’s story. Dr. Lake has been published in Rock Springs Review, STIR, Well-Versed: Literary Works, the Gasconade Review, the Mizzou Alumni Magazine, and 105 Meadowlark Reader. Born in a Mississippi River town, Lake’s love of the river shines through her stories. She resides near her family in Missouri with her canine companion, Hugo.

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Bull In the Ring, A Novel: Now Available in the Meadowlark Bookstore

Bull in the Ring
by Al Ortolani
Retail: $19.99

ISBN: 978-1-956578-42-3

EBOOK: 978-1-956578-43-0

FICTION / Small Town & Rural
FICTION / Coming of Age
FICTION / Historical / General

Armed with only poetry and wit, Danny wears his dead father’s army jacket and copes with the string of losers and abusers brought home by his mother. Will he find direction before he reaches the end of this dead-end road life has handed to him?

What Readers are Saying:

Al Ortolani’s Bull in the Ring manages to conjure other great coming-of-age stories—think The Catcher in the Rye, think The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian—while being “in a football conference all its own.” Danny Prego is an instantly iconic protagonist, masking deep hurt and insecurity with careful bravado and one-liners, with his dad’s boots that make him taller and the dream of a letter jacket that will make him feel like someone. Bull in the Ring is a time capsule of a book that made me nostalgic for an era before I was even born.

   —Melissa Fite Johnson, author of Green (Riot in Your Throat, 2021)


Al Ortolani’s crisp prose, peppered with poetry, grabs the reader and doesn’t let go. Will Danny find an exit on that dead-end road? Bull in the Ring is fiction, but its story is true. It takes place in my town. It takes place in yours. Don’t take my word for it. Read it for yourself.

   —Michael D. Graves, author of Human Shadow, Pete Stone Private Investigator series


Life to teen Danny Prego is one long series of hard knocks, from an alcoholic single mother and her dangerous boyfriend to finding trouble at school. Danny reads his reality like a football team and game, always getting back up and out of the mud and muck, regardless of how hard the tackles are. Just as he thinks he’s found secure footing in the circle of senior football players, life comes at Danny from all angles, then deals him a blow that will either take him to his knees or show him the way forward. Despite his tough-guy exterior, Danny Prego is a character who is all heart. Readers of all ages will be firmly on Danny’s team and cheering for him as he faces his most difficult decision to try to escape being the Bull in the Ring.
 
   —Julie A. Sellers, author of Ann of Sunflower Lane and Kansas Authors Club Prose Writer of the Year (2020, 2022)
 

Al Ortolani nailed small town Kansas life in this thoughtful, well-crafted teenage odyssey. It had me eager to see what would happen next . . . right up to the evocative ending. Indeed, I was so captivated by protagonist, Danny Prego, and his hard-scrabble life that I was left yearning for a sequel.
 
   —J.T. Knoll, The Morning Sun (Pittsburg, Kansas)

 
Al Ortolani knows how to tell a tale so it’s like we’re in Danny’s shoes, trying to keep a few steps ahead of troubles that take it in turn to smash into that bull in the ring who we’re soon-enough rooting for.
 
   —Brian Daldorph, Kansas Poems


Al O
rtolani is the Manuscript Editor for Woodley Press in Topeka, Kansas, and has directed a memoir writing project for Vietnam veterans across Kansas in association with the Library of Congress and Humanities Kansas. He is a 2019 recipient of the Rattle Chapbook Series Award. He has been a Kansas Notable Book recipient in 2017 and 2021. His poetry has appeared in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. After 43 years of teaching English in public schools, he currently lives a life without bells and fire drills in the Kansas City area with his wife Sherri and their rescue dog Stanley.

Tuesday, October 3, 2023

New Book Announcement! In Search of the Sublime by Arlice W. Davenport

Arlice W. Davenport's latest poetry collection 
In Search of the Sublime 
is out now!


Meadowlark is proud to be the publisher of each of Davenport's books, and we are excited to get this one in your hands.


Order In Search of the Sublime Here!




ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arlice W. Davenport is the author of four collections of poems, Setting the Waves on Fire, Everlasting: Poems, Kind of Blue: New Poems, and In Search of the Sublime, published, respectively, by Meadowlark Press (2020) and Meadowlark Poetry Press (2021, 2022, and 2023). He is the retired Books editor and Travel editor for The Wichita Eagle newspaper. He and his wife, Laura, continue their travels.








Bonus: Fifty select copies of 
 In Search of the Sublime will be joined by a companion chapbook, Heart of the Sacred Bear and Other Poems, and a bookmark!