Congratulations to the following UNP authors who were Nebraska Book Award Winners!
Winners will be honored at the Nebraska Celebration of Books (NCOB) literary festival on October 12 at the UNL City Campus Union. The awards ceremony will feature readings by some of the winning authors, designers, and illustrators of books with a Nebraska connection published in 2023.
Children’s Picture Book
Ted Kooser: More than a Local Wonder by Carla Ketner and illustrated by Paula Wallace. Long before Ted Kooser won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, served as the U.S. Poet Laureate, and wrote award-winning books for children, he was an unathletic child growing up in Iowa, yearning to fit in. Young Teddy found solace in stories, and one specific book, Robert McCloskey’s Lentil, inspired him to become a writer. Ted Kooser: More Than a Local Wonder celebrates the power of stories and of finding oneself through words.
Nonfiction Nebraska as Place
Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape by Dana Fritz. Dana Fritz traces the evolution of the Bessey Ranger District and Nursery of the Nebraska National Forest and Grasslands. Fritz’s contemporary photographs of this unique ecosystem, with provocative environmental essays, maps, and historical photographs from the U.S. Forest Service archives, illuminate the complex environmental and natural history of the site, especially as it relates to built environments, land use, and climate change.
Nonfiction History
The First Migrants by Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld. The First Migrants recounts the largely unknown story of Black people who migrated from the South to the Great Plains between 1877 and 1920 in search of land and freedom. They exercised their rights under the Homestead Act to gain title to 650,000 acres, settling in all of the Great Plains states. All sought a place where they could rise by their own talents and toil, unencumbered by Black codes, repression, and violence. Their quest foreshadowed the epic movement of Black people out of the South known as the Great Migration.
Poetry
The Gathering of Bastards by Romeo Oriogun. The Gathering of Bastards chronicles the movement of migrants as they navigate borders both internal and external. At the heart of these poems of vulnerability and sharp intelligence, the poet himself is the perpetual migrant embarked on forced journeys that take him across nations in West and North Africa, through Europe, and through American cities as he navigates the challenges of living through terror and loss and wrestles with the meaning of home.
