Original article can be found at The Dallas Morning News
Originally published on August 8,2010
By Elizabeth Bennett
Author Buzzy Jackson has the 20th most common surname in America, but she managed to trace her roots back more than 250 years. It wasn’t easy, as Jackson makes clear in Shaking the Family Tree, an entertaining, enlightening look at how she did it. (Read on …)
Original article can be found at newwest.net
Published on March 03, 2010
By Jenny Shank
Every week, publishers and authors send me books in the hope that I’ll review them for New West. I read pretty fast, but I can’t get to all of the deserving books, so some of them end up in my Book Cabinet of Guilt. My daughter keeps her crayons in the same cabinet, so every time she wants to color and opens the cabinet’s door, little wafts of guilt escape.
New West Books editor Jenny Shank offers five simple rules for publishing.
New West Article
By Jenny Shank
April 8, 2009
A few months ago, my parents got a letter in the mail from the Center of the American West that said I was invited to a banquet and the organizers wanted to give me some more money for a writing prize I’d won ten years ago. Back then, I was in grad school in Boulder and I was working on my first novel, which I entered in the Center’s first annual Thompson Awards for Western American Writing competition. There was no page limit, so instead of selecting a few chapters, I actually sent the entire manuscript I had at the time, and some poor souls apparently read 250 of my pages and gave me one of the prizes, perhaps as a nod to my audacity. (Read on …)
By Jenny Shank
New West Article
March 4, 2009
Last Friday the Rocky Mountain News printed its last edition. With the close of the paper, another great books section vanished forever. I sincerely hope that Patti Thorn, the Rocky’s gracious, smart Books Editor finds a new home for her talents soon. I wrote book reviews for the Rocky for over eight years, and read the paper every morning since I was a kid. (I went out on a good note, with a review of the great T.C. Boyle’s latest novel, The Women.) I feel like I lost a friend. The Denver Post picked up a handful of the Rocky’s reporters, but the vast majority of its 200 newsroom employees are out of work, not to mention the many freelancers who wrote for the paper.
Reporter Nancy Mitchell wrote an inside scoop on the Rocky’s demise for Salon this week, ”The Death Throes of My Newspaper.” This economy is really starting to suck. Thankfully, as Thorn wrote in one of her last Rocky columns, a good coping mechanism is to bury your nose in a book.
On a happier note, the Center for the American West honored Montana writer Thomas McGuane with its Wallace Stegner Award last week. Patricia Limerick, the Center’s resident genius, interviewed McGuane about his life, and he proved a worthy raconteur, regaling the crowd with stories about the time he worked on a movie with Marlon Brando, “The Missouri Breaks.” (Read on …)
Doug Fabrizio – Radio West
SALT LAKE CITY, UT
2/18/09
LISTEN NOW to Patty Limerick’s interview about Wallace Stegner
Wednesday on RadioWest we’re celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Wallace Stegner. Stegner was one of the most important writers of the American West – probably not overstating it to say his book “Angle of Repose” is a masterpiece. Stegner reworked the myth of the West and brought the lives and the landscape of this place into a new focus. We’ll talk about his life and his work, his time here in Utah and how his writing still influences our impressions of the West.
On Science, History and Exploration
February 17, 2009
By Michael Robinson
Read the Blog
The word “Frontier” lives a double-life. In the public world of bookstores and Star Trek episodes, it carries itself with bearing, symbolizing something wild and lawless, a place of promise, adventure, and renewal. Within the Academy, however, “frontier” carries the whiff of the disreputable, a word that has fallen into disuse. Once praised and powerful, it now stoops on stair-landings to rest.
The decline of the “frontier” within the Academy has been long and precipitous. Made famous by Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” it’s been the inspiration of dozens of books and hundreds of articles. (Read on …)
McGuane honored with 2009 Wallace Stegner Award
Colorado Daily Article
By Amy Bounds (Contact)
Originally published 05:20 p.m., February 16, 2009
Updated 05:20 p.m., February 16, 2009
Western author Tom McGuane is the recipient of the 2009 Wallace Stegner Award, the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado announced Monday.
McGuane is best known for his novels “The Sporting Club,” “The Bushwhacked Piano” and “Ninety-Two in the Shade.”
The Stegner award, named for the American historian and writer, is presented every year by the Center of the American West to “an individual who has made a sustained contribution to the cultural identity of the West through literature, art, history, lore or an understanding of the West.”
McGuane’s award ceremony, which is open to the public, will be at 7 p.m. Feb. 26 in Room 100 of the Mathematics Building on the CU-Boulder campus.
CU Boulder News Center Article
February 16, 2009
The Center of the American West at the University of Colorado at Boulder announced today it will present its 2009 Wallace Stegner Award to author Tom McGuane, best known for his novels “The Sporting Club,” “The Bushwhacked Piano” and “Ninety-Two in the Shade.”
“Tom McGuane has been a spectacular ‘participant-observer’ in the changing world of the American West,” said Patty Limerick, chair of the board and faculty director of the center. “With equal grace, he reckons with the tragic and comic dimensions of human nature. Looking at the West through his eyes gives your habits of mind a productive shaking.” (Read on …)
Center of the American West examines literary diversity
Conor Doyle
The Campus Press Article
Issue date: 11/13/08
The Center for the American West is promoting a new way of getting the experience of American immigrants across to a large audience.
Members of the CU and Boulder community gathered in Old Main Chapel on Wednesday night and listened to speakers present tales of immigration for the center’s 12th annual Words to Stir the Soul event. (Read on …)
BOULDER – Immigration is the subject of the 12th annual Words to Stir the Soul event to be presented by the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Nov. 12.
Among the readers will be Manuel Ramos (left), author of Chicano literature and director of advocacy for Colorado Legal Services, reporter Bruce Finley (right) of The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News columnist Tina Griego (center). In all, about a dozen people will read at the event. (Read on …)