A Peek Inside "Gravedigger's Daughter"

 The first shipment of books is on the way! Order your copy today or plan to join us for our first in-person book launch in more than a year! 

Gravedigger's Daughter: 

Vignettes from a Small Kansas Town

by Cheryl Unruh

Saturday, November 13, 2021, 1:00pm

Lyon County History Center and Museum

711 Commercial, Emporia, Kansas

Presentation and Book Launch 

For our Wednesday excerpt, we share a few poems from Cheryl's new book. Enjoy!

Praise for:

With Gravedigger’s Daughter, Cheryl Unruh has created something so fresh and inviting--a memoir in lean vignettes. Each is moving on its own, and also part of a compelling portrait of a childhood in an isolated town with a dwindling population. Unruh’s details are too specific for sentimentalism, but places and people are observed with a loving gaze that also feels wise and honest. Her father, especially, emerges as both haunted and quietly heroic. What a beautiful book. 

—Laura Moriarty, author of The Chaperone

 

Cheryl Unruh is one of the great chroniclers of life under the Kansas sky, a travel guide into the hearts and minds of people minted on the prairie. A long-time columnist for the Emporia Gazette, Unruh’s “dad poems” in Gravedigger’s Daughter remind me of another Kansas journalist, Elfriede Fisher Rowe, who published micro-narratives about people and events in Lawrence. In her new collection, Unruh creates not only an archive of the relationship with her father, but through those remembrances paints the history of Pawnee Rock, her hometown, one four-paragraph brush stroke at a time.

—George Frazier, author of The Last Wild Places of Kansas: Journeys into Hidden Landscapes