Invitation to a Double Book Launch: July 26, Emporia

Remembering Martha                                     Human Shadow

ISBN 978-1956578379                                   ISBN 978-1956578409

Retail: $16.99                                                 Retail: $17.99

Meadowlark Press                                           Meadowlark Press

July 2023                                                        July 2023

Meadowlark Press Announces Double Book Launch Featuring Emporia Authors

EMPORIA, KS - Emporia’s Meadowlark Press will celebrate the release of Remembering Martha by Jerilynn Jones Henrikson and Human Shadow, by Michael D. Graves on July 26, 2023, at the historic Granada Theater in downtown Emporia from 6-8p.m.

Henrikson and Graves have written books inspired by their grandparents. As part of the launch, each author will read short selections from their new books. The audience will have some time to ask questions about their writing processes and inspiration.

Remembering Martha, a novella, is inspired by an interview Henrikson did with her grandmother for a class at ESU. Martha grew up in the small town of Neosho Rapids at the turn of the 20^th century. This book captures the grueling life on the Kansas prairie, but does so with humor, as the reader follows Martha’s life amid its challenges and joys.

Emporia State University professor, Amy Sage Webb-Baza calls Henrikson’s book “a feast for the soul and the sense: hilarious, heartbreaking, rich with detail.”

Human Shadow by Mike Graves is book number five in the Pete Stone Private Investigator series. Stone is a private detective in 1930s Wichita. Oft-champion of the downtrodden, Stone takes on a case to prove the innocence of a shell-shocked war veteran accused of arson and murder. Graves created the Pete Stone character as a memorial to his grandfather. His first and third Pete Stone novels, To Leave a Shadow and All Hallows’ Shadows, were Kansas Notable Books.

Come to socialize, eat some apple pie, and celebrate family legacy, Kansas roots, and books with Jerilynn, Mike, and Meadowlark Press. Books will be available for purchase at this event. Learn more at www.meadowlarkbookstore.com.

 

###

You're Invited! Local Writers Read, April 8th

 

Learn About Our Readers

Jerilynn Jones Henrikson

Like First Citizen William Allen White, Jerilynn is proud to be from Emporia. Her schooling is of this place. Here, she met and married her husband, Duane Henrikson, also an Emporia native. Their four children were raised here, and two of them have returned to raise their families here. One of her seven grandkids attended ESU. Jerilynn says she’s addicted to this town, this prairie and its sky. She is also addicted to words and the stories they build. She taught Language Arts at Emporia High School for 20 years, and after retiring in 2003 began tending to her desire to be a writer. She has written eight children’s picture books, a humorous memoir, and two historical fiction YA novels, including her award-winning Meadowlark book, A Time for Tears. 

Julie Sellers

Julie Sellers was born and raised in the Flint Hills near the small town of Florence, Kansas. Those great expanses of tallgrass prairie and reading fueled her imagination, and she began writing at an early age. After living in several states and countries, Julie is happy to make her home in Atchison, KS. She has published three academic books, and her creative prose and poetry have appeared in publications such as 105 Meadowlark Reader, Wanderlust, Kansas Time + Place, and more. Julie was the Kansas Author’s Club Prose Writer of the Year in 2020 and 2022. In the Kansas Voices Contest, she was the Overall Poetry Winner in 2022 and the Overall Prose Winner in 2017 and 2019. Her collection Kindred Verse: Poems Inspired by Anne of Green Gables (Blue Cedar Press) was released in 2021. Her debut novel, Ann of Sunflower Lane, was released by Meadowlark Press in 2022.

Duane L. Herrmann

Duane L. Herrmann’s family has lived in Kansas since the 1860s. His poetry celebrates the prairie and life on the prairie. He is an internationally published, award-winning poet and historian and the author of 11 books, including Family Plowing, a poetry collection published by Meadowlark in 2019. This book consists of new unpublished poems, published but previously uncollected poems, and some poems from previous collections, many revised. In addition to writing, he has carried baby kittens in his mouth, pet snakes, and has conversations with owls, but is careful not to anger them! Duane is an important voice in poetry, honoring the Midwest, its culture, its wildlife, and its people.

Lisa Stewart

At 54, Lisa Stewart set out to regain the fearless girl she once had been. Hot, homeless, and horseback, she snapped back into every original cell—riding her horse, Chief, 500 miles home. On an extraordinary homegoing from Kansas City to Bates and Vernon Counties in Missouri, Lisa exhausted herself, faced her past, trusted strangers, and stayed in the middle of her frightened horse to learn, perhaps for the first time, that this world was out to protect her. You can read all about it in her memoir, The Big Quiet, published by Meadowlark in 2021.

Olive Sullivan

Olive Sullivan holds an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine and an MA from the University of Colorado-Denver. A bookbinder, she lives in Pittsburg, KS, where she grew up. She loves taking long walks on the prairie with dogs and traveling anywhere that requires a passport–and almost anywhere that doesn’t. Olive’s Meadowlark books include Skiving Down the Bones, published in 2022, and Wandering Bone, published in 2017.

A’Kena LongBenton

A’Kena LongBenton is a metro Detroit native, who recently moved to Emporia (with her husband, Larry Benton) to teach instructional design and technology courses at Emporia State University. As a Harvard-trained college educator, A’Kena specializes in video productions of classic/cultural literature and other disciplines. She has written for a professional development magazine, academic/literary journals, and print/online educational newsletters in the disciplines of English, language arts, instructional technology, and distance learning. Her work has been featured in a regional criminology college textbook regarding multicultural issues facing America. A’Kena has written an academic-related booklet on public speaking, two books of poetry, and two booklets of short stories using only six words or less. Most of her 20+ writings have been in academia, but A’Kena takes immense joy in the moments when she can write for pleasure. Specifically, A’Kena was asked to write a poetic piece on Summer Palace (an imperial garden created by the Qing Dynasty) when she was teaching college professors in Beijing, China. 

THREE TITLES BY MEADOWLARK PRESS NAMED AS FINALISTS IN 31st ANNUAL MIDWEST BOOK AWARDS

 Winners announced June 26, social media premiere with book giveaways to follow.

 

[EMPORIA, KS]—[April 29, 2021] —Three books released by Meadowlark Press in 2020 were named finalists in the the 31^st annual Midwest Book Awards. In the Mystery category, All Hallows’ Shadows, the third book in the Pete Stone series, by Michael D. Graves, Emporia, was a finalist. In fiction for Youth Adults, two of the three titles making the list were published by Meadowlark: A Time for Tears, by Jerilynn Jones Henrikson, Emporia, and Opulence, Kansas, by Julie Stielstra, Lyons, Illinois. The awards program, which is organized by the Midwest Independent Publishers Association (MiPA), recognizes quality independent publishing in the Midwest.

“In so many ways, 2020 was a rough year for publishing. We did not get to have any of our usual release parties as social distancing restrictions upended our usual routes of getting books into the hands of readers. But we continued to focus on the quality of our product, and, quite honestly, our 2020 books are some of the best we’ve produced yet. All of our authors are award winners from where I stand but making the finalists list for the Midwest Book Awards is a wonderful bit of recognition. We have so many quality stories being written by Kansans and about Kansas,” said Tracy Simmons, publisher, Meadowlark Press.

The 31^st annual Midwest Book Awards was open to books published and copyrighted in 2020 in MiPA’s 12-state Midwestern region: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin.

This year’s competition garnered 241 entries in 35 categories, submitted by 74 independent publishers and judged by a panel of nearly one hundred librarians and booksellers from throughout the Midwest.

Historically, an awards gala is held in Minneapolis to announce the winners, but this year, as in 2020, winners will be announced and celebrated online, first in a Zoom webinar open to MiPA members and finalists, and shortly thereafter in a social media premiere that can be shared with friends and family. A period of book giveaways and winner highlights will accompany the social media premiere.

“This shift to celebrating online has enabled us to engage with a larger publishing community throughout the Midwest,” said Jennifer Baum, executive director of MiPA. “The number of entries received in 2020 grew by about 25% compared to the prior year, which can be attributed to our greater online presence.”

Following the conclusion of the gala celebrations, winners will be encouraged to participate in MiPA’s second season of the Virtual Reading Series, a limited series launched last year on MiPA’s YouTube channel.

Finalist books will also be for sale in MiPA’s affiliate shop on Bookshop.org, a website that shares proceeds with independent booksellers. Buyers can opt to select which independent store will receive the commission, or to leave it in a general pool to be distributed among independent booksellers.

For a complete list of finalists, visit www.mipa.org/midwest-book-awards. Follow @MIPAMidwestBookAwards on Facebook for updates on the gala’s social media premiere and book giveaways.

The Midwest Book Awards, which began in 1989, recognizes the best independent literature to come out of the Midwest each year and is organized by the Midwest Independent Publishers Association (MiPA). Founded in 1984, MiPA exists today as a vibrant professional nonprofit association made up of traditional presses, university presses, author-publishers, hybrid presses and related support industries, such as graphic designers and printers. MiPA serves the Midwest independent publishing community through regular educational programming, networking and peer recognition.

##

Holocaust Remembrance Day: A Time for Tears

This week's excerpt, in recognition of Holocaust Remembrance Day, comes from Jerilynn Jones Henrikson's YA novel, A Time for Tears.

World War II contains millions of stories, for it affected millions of lives. A Time for Tears examines three. André Jabot, a teenage French aristocrat, is enraged by the killing of his young brother as the Nazis blitz the nearby village of Soissons. He swears vengeance and finds his way to England to join De Gaulle and the Resistance. Daniel Hagelman, a young Jewish grocer from Kansas, cannot turn his back on the horror of Hitler’s Nazis and travels to England to volunteer in the Royal Air Force, leaving behind a wife and newborn baby girl. Fifteen-year-old Rachel Ropfogel’s parents, upper class Parisian Jews, see the oncoming disaster as France falls to the Nazis. They arrange sanctuary for their daughter in the remote village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon where she assumes a new identity, Simon Bouret, a twenty-year-old art teacher. Each of these characters become members of the French Resistance and find themselves pursued by the relentless SS officer, Fredrik Haught. Murder, torture, chaos, orphaned children, caged babies, starving captives: cyanide tablets become a reasonable alternative. In war, many die, some survive. War ends, but only if survivors remember and teach future generations what they have learned, only if they remember A Time for Tears.

Chapter 5: Awakenings

That afternoon, as Simone prepared to burn the British agent’s clothing, she noticed a small wallet in the breast pocket of his jacket. When she opened it, she discovered a worn photograph of a little girl about the same age as Marie. She wore a crisp summer dress. The photo caught her sitting quietly, looking away from the photographer into the distance. The similarity of the child to Marie was, in fact, remarkable. She seemed to radiate the same happy disposition. They could have been sisters. On the back of the photo was written in neat script, Maggie Daniella Hagelman, age 3 1/2 years, and taped there was a wispy curl of fine brown hair.

What's your stack look like? A Thanksgiving letter from our publicist

Dear readers:

I wish you all a truly lovely Thanksgiving. We all know it's a weird holiday season, so please keep doing your part to spread love and compassion. 

Hopefully, you will have some downtime today. When I have downtime, on Thanksgiving especially, all I want to do is crawl into bed and read, how 'bout you? 

Excerpt from the Newest Book on the Meadowlark Shelf!

 

Now available for purchase at the Meadowlark Bookstore
and wherever you buy books!

The war began for the Hagelman family in Kansas in 1939 when Daniel made the decision to leave his family. Newborn daughter Maggie was just minutes old when he left her, his wife Ida, and their home above their grocery store in Topeka, Kansas, to travel to England to volunteer with British forces to help defeat Hitler.

Daniel’s grandparents had left Germany to eventually settle in Topeka two generations before, when anti-semitism drove them from Heidelberg, where they operated a kosher meat market in the Jewish quarter. In 1935, more Hagelman relatives came from Berlin as the Nazi threat to Jews became increasingly ominous. Long evenings of serious discussion among new arrivals, Cousins Berta and Jacob Hotzel, and Ida and Daniel, brought sharp focus to the evil that was brewing in Germany. “Adolf Hitler und hees Nazis are devils,” Cousin Berta declared. “Hees thugs come in night to bookshop next door to our market, throw stones through vindows, burn books in street. They break vindows in our market und steal meat, butcher tools, wreck everyting. Jews not safe on streets. Hitler lie about us. Ve not lif in dirt or haf sickness. Ve not steal babies to make Jewish.”

“Yes,” Jacob added, “und verse, so many Germans belief dees lies: “Jews steal our wealth, Jews sell us out in the Great War. Our German friends and neighbors turn against us.”

“Dere are stories of labor camp und Jews taken avay in middle of night, never to be see again,” Berta added. “Und verst of all, many Americans not vant us here. Tank God ve haf you to come to!”

Every Saturday at temple, at coffee or lunch in the local deli, around dinner tables, the Jewish community in Topeka spoke with growing concern about the horrors of Hitler’s antisemitism. Other strong voices spoke out about the necessity of opposing Hitler’s policies. One evening on the radio, the Hagelmans heard the editor of The Emporia Gazette, a small-town newspaper in Emporia, just fifty miles south of Topeka. That editor, William Allen White, Progressive friend of former President Teddy Roosevelt, influenced Daniel with his words. As Chairman of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, White described the Nazi threat by saying,

 

“It stands just beyond our borders waiting. What your sacrifices will be, what hardships you may meet, what anguish you may know, I cannot prophesize. I only know unless that beast is chained upon the fields of France, your lives will be maimed and mangled by its claws.”

 

White’s warning and the experiences of Daniel’s own family convinced him to act, to do what he could to help stop Hitler’s assault upon human decency. “I know Americans are struggling to do the right thing,” Daniel stated one evening at dinner. “The Isolationists want us to stay out of the fighting. That’s understandable. So many died in the Great War. Memories of thousands dying of disease and mustard gas in the trenches remain vivid. They think the broad oceans will keep us safe, but modern aeroplanes and U-boats can reach us. Meanwhile thousands are suffering. My heart breaks to leave you, Ida, and our little child, but I must go to keep my country, my people, and you—my family—from harm.”

Daniel would make his decision in March of 1939. The Japanese, allies of Hitler’s German Reich, made the decision for America on December 7, 1941, when they launched their deadly attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. By then, Daniel Hagelman was already in Lyon, France with a British commando unit helping the French Resistance.