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 This book consists of new unpublished poems, published but previously uncollected poems, and some poems from previous collections, many revised.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. 

New Book by Pittsburg Poet, Olive L. Sullivan

Pittsburg, KS – Olive L. Sullivan, Pittsburg, is the author of the newest book from Meadowlark Press, now available. Sullivan will be reading from Skiving Down the Bones at the Pittsburg Public Library at 6:00 pm on Monday, December 12. The event is free to the public.

“Long before the Pandemic locked us all into our homes, my personal period of isolation began with my 2017 diagnosis of Acute Myleoid Leukemia, a particularly deadly and fast acting cancer,” writes Sullivan in the book’s opening pages.

The resulting collection of poetry paints a picture of loss, but also of survival in the face of loss. Skiving “through layers of / loss and sorrow, honing in on what matters,” this book shows us how one woman faces her own impending death, the loss of her husband and her father, and comes out on the other side, very much alive, “only truth remaining.”

Sullivan is also the author of Wandering Bone (Meadowlark Press, 2017), a collection of travel poems. Her poetry has also appeared in several journals including The Midwest Quarterly, The Little Balkans Review, and the online magazine Dead Housekeeping, as well as in the award-winning anthology Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems. She has published short fiction and creative essays and performs regularly with the band Amanita. She 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, Kansas, 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.

Meadowlark Press is an independent publisher, specializing in books by Midwest authors since 2014. Learn more at meadowlarkbookstore.com. The book can be ordered from the author, from the publisher, and any bookstore. It is available locally at Books and Burrow in Pittsburg.

###