What connects a book about the tragic, century-old story of a Circleville family’s literary labor of love and a Korean War-era love story by an Ohio Wesleyan professor? Along with three other books, they received an Ohioana Book Award last night at the Ohio Statehouse.
The story of Circleville resident and amateur ornithologist and artist Genevieve Jones provided the basis for Joy Kiser’s America’s Other Audubon, the 2013 Ohioana Book Award winner for About Ohio or an Ohioan. Jones started her nineteenth-century book Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, with the intent of representing the birds of Ohio in the same fashion and format as James Audubon had done for the general birds of America. However, as Kiser’s book makes plain, Jones endured many struggles, and her family eventually undertook a seven year project to finish the book, through Typhoid fever, heart disease and near blindness. Ironically, as Kiser noted, the marshlands around Circleville at the time of Jones’ creation of the book provided not only a wonderful environment for the birds and eggs that Jones loved but also a probable breeding ground for the Typhoid fever contracted by three of the four members of the Jones family, which greatly slowed production on the book.
The young soldier protagonist of Ohio Wesleyan Professor of English Robert Olmstead’s The Coldest Night has a similarly difficult life, before and during the Korean War. Along with the Ohioana Book Award for fiction, The Coldest Night has garnered other praise, such as an Editors’ Pick for Amazon’s Best of 2012 list, a Publisher’s Weekly pick for Best Books of the Year, and a 2011-2012 Choose to Read Ohio adult title.
Newly installed Ohioana Executive Director David Weaver characterizes the work of the Ohioana Book Awards as a way to “select, preserve and promote Ohio’s creative talent, [starting with] the first Ohioana awards in 1932.” Since this first award, to two-time Pulitzer prize winner James “Scotty” Reston, Ohioana has had “a tradition of picking notable writers,” said Weaver, “and it has recognized just about every major Ohio writer: Toni Morrison, Louis Bromfield and James Thurber, among others, even the first ‘Carolyn Keene,’ Mildred Benson, who ghost wrote many early Nancy Drew books.”
Other 2013 award recipients include Louise Borden, His Name Was Raoul Wallenberg (Juvenile Literature); Tracy Chevalier, The Last Runaway (Fiction Set in Ohio); Julie Zickefoose, The Bluebird Effect (Nonfiction), Martha Collins, White Papers (Poetry), and Bernard Matambo (Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant).
More information can be found online at www.ohioana.org.