Minnesota Book Awards for 2013

 

 

The Minnesota Book Awards were announced on Saturday, April 13, after one group of judges narrowed each category to four books, and another group selected the winner from the finalists.

The winners this year are:

 Children’s Literature

David LaRochelle – It’s a Tiger!

In this picture book  the main character runs into (and away from) a tiger, over and over again, while the plot gets sillier and sillier.  The author is a previous Minnesota Book Award winner, and lives in White Bear Lake

 General Nonfiction

David Treuer – Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life

Centered on Ojibwe reservation communities of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, Rez Life is the first book written by an insider about what Indian reservations are, why they exist, and where they are going. 

Treuer divides his time between Los Angeles, where he is a professor of literature and creative writing at USC, and the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota.

David Housewright – Curse of the Jade Lily

Genre Fiction

In the ninth novel in the Rushmore McKenzie crime series, thieves steal the 200-year-old Jade Lily from a Minneapolis art museum and then offer to sell it back for one-third of its insured value — $1.3 million. But there’s a catch. They demand that unlicensed private eye Rushmore McKenzie act as go-between. Housewright has won both the Edgar Award and the Minnesota Book Award for his crime fiction.

 Memoir and Creative Nonfiction

Atina Diffley – Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works
The author reminds us that we live in relationships—with the earth, plants and animals, families and communities. A memoir of making these essential relationships work in the face of challenges from weather to corporate politics, this is a firsthand history of getting in at the “ground level” of organic farming. Diffley and her husband, Martin, owned and operated one of the first certified organic produce farms in the Midwest from 1972 through 2007 and now run the consulting business, Organic Farming Works, LLC.

 Minnesota

Gwen Westerman and Bruce White – Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota
Much of the focus on the Dakota people in Minnesota rests on the tragic events of the 1862 U.S.–Dakota War and the resulting exile that sent the majority of the Dakota to prisons and reservations beyond the state’s boundaries. But the true depth of the devastation of removal cannot be understood without a closer examination of the history of the Dakota people and their deep cultural connection to the land that is Minnesota. Drawing on oral history interviews, archival work, Mni Sota Makoce tells a detailed history of the Dakota people in their traditional homelands for hundreds of years prior to exile. Westerman is professor of English and Humanities at Minnesota State University in Mankato. White is author of We Are at Home: Pictures of the Ojibwe People

 

Novel and Short Story

Louise Erdrich – The Round House
One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe.  While Bazil, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of their own.   This book also won the Nation Book Award.   This is Erdrich’s fifth Minnesota Book Award.  She lives in Minneapolis.

 Poetry

Patricia Kirkpatrick – Odessa
A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in Kirkpatrick’s Odessa fighting for her life. The tumor presses against her amygdalae, the “emotional core of the self,” and central to the process of memory. In poems emotionally charged but void of sentimentality, Kirkpatrick creates from loss a dreamlike reality. Odessa, “roof of the underworld,” a refuge at once real and imagined, resembles simultaneously the Midwestern prairie and a mythical god-inhabited city.  Kirkpatrick lives in St. Paul.

 Young People’s Literature
Geoff Herbach – Nothing Special

Nothing Special is the follow-up to Stupid Fast. It’s next year and Felton is as big and bad as everyone thought he’d be. Unfortunately, he’s still a little kid on the inside. He’s a jerk to his pal, Gus. His little brother, Andrew, struggles mightily without Felton’s help. Really, Felton’s got the curse of the monkey, real bad. He can’t see beyond his own tiny little problems. But if he doesn’t clean up his act, he’ll lose Gus. He’ll lose Aleah. He may already have lost Andrew who says he’s going to orchestra camp, but never shows up.  Herbach lives in Mankato.