By Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian
The 2018 Minnesota Book Awards were presented on April 21. This
was the 30th annual awards ceremony, which is sponsored by the
Friends of the St. Paul Public Library.
These awards celebrate Minnesota authors and illustrators.
This year’s award for children’s literature went to A Different Pond by Bao Phi. This picture
book tells a story from Phi’s childhood.
He would wake up early with his father to fish in a Minneapolis pond
before his father went to work, as a way to help feed their family, and his
father would tell him about a different pond he used to go to in Vietnam. “A Different Pond” was also a Caldecott Honor
Book this year, and we have it at the Litchfield Library.
The award for genre fiction went to The End of Temperance Dare by Wendy Webb. This Gothic
thriller is set in a former tuberculosis sanatorium, now turned into an
artists’ retreat. The new director is
expecting a peaceful change from her old job as a crime reporter, but a sense
of impending doom strikes her as soon as she arrives on the grounds, and she
begins to suspect that the artists have been gathered there for a sinister
purpose. The Litchfield Library also has
a copy of this novel.
Linda LeGarde Grover won the award for memoir and creative
nonfiction with Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year. Onigamiising is the
Ojibwe name for Duluth, “the place of the small portage.” Grover is an Ojibwe elder and a professor at
the University of Minnesota – Duluth.
The essays in this collection originally were published as monthly
columns in the Duluth Budgeteer newspaper, and they are reflections on life through
the seasons of the year. Litchfield
Library has this memoir.
The novel and short story award went to What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah. This is a collection of fantastical short
stories about the ties between family members, lovers, and friends, and between
them and the places they call home.
Arimah has previously won awards for her stories in magazines; this is
her first book, and it has also won a number of honors. The Litchfield Library owns a copy.
The award for poetry went to Heid E. Erdrich for Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media. Heid is a professor at Augsburg University, a member of the Turtle
Mountain Band of Ojibwe, and the sister of novelist Louise Erdrich. This is her second book of poetry to win the
Minnesota Book Award. Communication and
technology are the themes of this collection, which is on order for the
Litchfield Library.
Andrea Swensson is the host of The Local Show on the radio
station The Current. She won this year’s
award for Minnesota Nonfiction with Got to Be Something Here: The Rise of the Minneapolis Sound. This book explores
the development of R&B, funk, and soul in the Twin Cities, starting with
1958, the year Prince was born. This
book is available at the Dassel and Glencoe libraries and can be ordered by our
patrons.
The other winning books were The End of the Wild by Nicole
Helget (middle grade literature), The Exo Project by Andrew DeYoung (young
adult literature), and The First and Only Book of Sack: 36 Years of Cartoons
for the Star Tribune by Steve Sack (general nonfiction). Read Minnesotan!
