2003 Minnesota Book Awards Winners
May 19, 2003

The Minnesota Book Awards, sponsored by the Minnesota Humanities Commission, is an annual awards program that recognizes, honors, and celebrates Minnesota’s literary culture. Since 1988, more than 750 Minnesota-written books have been Minnesota Book Award finalists—representing what some call "the best reading list in Minnesota."

Award winners were announced at a public awards ceremony on Friday, May 16, 2003, 7:00 p.m. at the Fitzgerald Theater, St. Paul.

Fiction
Miniatures
by Norah Labiner
Coffee House Press
(From the publisher) Norah Labiner’s masterful follow-up to her groundbreaking Our Sometime Sister is an engrossing and innovative work conceived in classical style, popping with pop cultural panache, and exhibiting all the gifts that led the Utne Reader to laud her as one of the 10 "novelists who are changing the way we see the world."

Miniatures is an intensely evocative novel with haunting characters and beautiful, painterly prose that summon the ghosts of Mary Shelley, Marcel Proust, and the Brontë sisters. Young, impetuous, and possessing a passionate, vulnerable intellect, American Fern Jacobi is traveling in Ireland when she finds work as a live-in housekeeper to famous and reclusive writers Owen and Brigid Lieb.

The eccentric and world-weary Owen has lived in the shadow of scandal and suspicion ever since his first wife, a beloved and iconic novelist, committed suicide in the grand, drafty house where Fern has came to work. Amidst the Lieb’s riddled and deceitful world, Fern forges an alliance with Brigid, Owen’s beautiful second wife. When the two share the discovery of a controversial bundle of hidden letters, Fern not only unearths answers to the first wife’s suicide, but also to her own past.

Young Adult Fiction
Firestorm
by Jan Neubert Schultz
The Lerner Publishing Group
(From the publisher) It's September 1, 1894, and 13-year-old Maggie Grant and her family are about to face a terror like none they've ever experienced. Having recently moved to the newly constructed town of Hinckley, Minnesota, they are caught in the path of one of the deadliest forest fires in history. Separated from her brothers and forced to flee, Maggie begins a harrowing train ride to Duluth, Minnesota, as the fire rages around her. Once there, Maggie must make a choice—should she stay in Duluth, or can she face her fears and return to what remains of Hinckley to search for her brothers?

Young Adult Nonfiction
The Good Path
by Thomas M. Peacock and Marlene Wisuri
Afton Historical Society Press
(From the publisher) Ideally suited for classroom use or home reading, this illustrated history of the Ojibwe culture for young people focuses on the teachings of the Good Path, nine core values that are the fundamental basis of Ojibwe philosophy:

• Honor the Creator
• Honor Elders
• Honor Women
• Honor Our Elder Brothers (the plant and animal beings)
• Be Peaceful
• Be Kind to Everyone
• Be Moderate in Our Thoughts, Words, and Deeds
• Be Courageous
• Keep Our Promises

Kids of all cultures journey through time with the Ojibwe people as their guide to the Good Path and its universal lessons of courage, cooperation, and honor. Through traditional native tales, hear about Grandmother Moon, the mysterious Megis shell, and the souls of plants and animals. Through Ojibwe history, learn how trading posts, treaties, and warfare affected Native Americans. Through activities designed especially for kids, discover fun ways to follow the Good Path’s timeless wisdom every day.

Children's Fiction
Countdown to Kindergarten
by Alison McGhee (illus. by Harry Bliss)
Harcourt/Silver Whistle
(From the publisher) It's just 10 days before kindergarten, and this little girl has heard all there is to know—from a first grader—about what it's going to be like. You can't bring your cat, you can't bring a stuffed animal, and the number one rule? You can't ask anyone for help. Ever. So what do you do when your shoes come untied, if you're the only one in the class who doesn't know how to tie them up again?

Told with gentle humor by Alison McGhee and brought to exuberant life by New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss, this lighthearted take on pre-kindergarten anxiety will bring a smile to the face of every child—and parent—having first-day jitters.

Children's Nonfiction
The Sky's the Limit: Stories of Discovery by Women and Girls
by Catherine Thimmesh (illus. by Melissa Sweet)
Houghton Mifflin
(From the publisher) They study the night sky, watch chimpanzees in the wild, and dig up ancient clay treasures. They search the beach for rare fossils, photograph old rock carvings, explore the hazards of lead poisoning, and wander into dark caves. And in their watching, digging, and wandering they become discoverers. Young and old, they are women and girls who discover 70-million-year-old sea lizards, the very origins of counting and writing, Stone Age cave art, mysterious matter in the universe, and how a puddle of water can be sanitized when heated by the sun. Here is a tribute to the findings and revelations of these remarkable women and girls: to their perseverance, their epiphanies, their wondrous curiosity. Brought to life by stunning collage illustrations, these inspiring stories drawn from primary sources consistently probe into still unanswered questions. Here are discoveries that open our eyes not only to what women and girls can accomplish but also to the astonishing world in which we live.

Poetry
The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande
by Ray Gonzalez
BOA Editions
(From the publisher) Known for his superrealism and magical images born of the imagery of the Chicano/South Western culture, Ray Gonzalez gives new imagery and intensity to the mystery and common miracles of that culture. In "Tiny Doll with No Arms," Gonzalez reassures us that the mysteries of the everyday will never be solved but will remain a source of the power of belief, the bewildering richness of what we can approach but not define: "[the doll] does not have any arms./I don't know why it was carved that way,/don't know what it means,/why the invisible palms hold everything."

Anthology or Collection of Short Stories by Multiple Authors
Keys to the Interior
by Robert Hedin and Richard Broderick (eds.)
Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies

Autobiography, Biography, Memoir
Back to Mississippi: A Personal Journey Through the Events that Changed America in 1964
by Mary V. Winstead
Hyperion
(From the publisher) Mary Winstead grew up in Minneapolis, captivated by her father's tales of his boyhood in rural Mississippi. As a child, she visited her relatives down South, and her nostalgia for that world and its people would compel her to collect her father's stories for her own children. But Winstead's research into her family history led her to a series of horrifying revelations: about her relatives' ingrained racism, their involvement with the Klan, and their connection to the infamous 1964 murders of three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney.

Writing with dignity, humility, and a profound sense of time and place, Winstead chronicles her awakening to painful truths about people she loved and thought she knew. She profiles her father, a man of remarkable charm and secretiveness. She traces her family’s roots through post-Civil War poverty, Southern pride, and Jim Crow laws, exploring racism on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Most movingly, she details her own inner war, a battle between her love for her family and their untenable beliefs and practices.

Minnesota Subject
Voices for the Land
photos by Brian Peterson
Minnesota Historical Society Press
(From the publisher) "A place is not a thing," writes Paul Gruchow in the foreword to Voices for the Land, "it is a relationship. A location becomes a place only in the context of time, of history." In this extraordinary tribute to the importance of the ordinary places in our lives, 52 Minnesotans write about the special, sometimes secret, places that give their lives meaning. For some it is their home or cabin or lake. For others, it's a family farm or neighborhood park, a backyard garden or north woods trail: all places where we find a personal and spiritual connection to the land.

Voices for the Land explores this complex relationship by linking these personal essays with striking images captured by award-winning photographer Brian Peterson. This marriage of words, images, and landscape provides a powerful reminder of our deep and abiding connection to the land. The writers share the experience of these favorite places through their senses, from the aching tingle of a cold winter night and the sound of ice "singing" to the buzz of mosquitoes and the acrid smell of burning peat.

The Voices for the Land project, organized by the non-profit group 1,000 Friends of Minnesota, encouraged Minnesotans to write about the land they love and to fight for its preservation. The Minneapolis Star Tribune published a selection of these essays, paired with Brian Peterson's photos, in an award-winning series. Voices for the Land brings these essays and photos together in book form for the first time.

"Ordinary places," writes Paul Gruchow, "are as necessary to a good community as are ordinary people." Voices for the Land speaks to the power of these ordinary places and the value of preserving them for the simple reason that they are special to someone.

Multicultural
Overcoming: The Autobiography of W. Harry Davis
by W. Harry Davis
Afton Historical Society Press
(From the publisher) W. HARRY DAVIS has been a leading voice for civil rights in his native Minneapolis for more than four decades. Rising from the impoverished North Side ghetto of his childhood, he became the founding chief executive of the Minneapolis Urban Coalition, a 20-year member of the city's school board, and one of the first black executives at a major Twin Cities corporation.

Along the way he overcame Polio, became the region's most successful amateur boxing coach, led a historic church merger, founded a bank, served on the U.S. Olympic boxing committee, and campaigned as the city's first black mayoral candidate.

Davis's story serves as a reminder that the civil-rights movement was not confined to places like Selma and Birmingham, but also transformed lives for the better in Minneapolis and around the country. Told with Davis's characteristic generosity of spirit, it will also inspire hope in anyone who has ever wondered whether life's obstacles can be overcome.

MPR's Cathy Wurzer talks with the author of Overcoming: The Autobiography of W. Harry Davis. Listen

New Age, Metaphysics, and Spirituality
Pathways to Spirituality and Healing
by Alexa Umbreit and Mark Umbreit
Fairview Press
(From the publisher) After being diagnosed with breast cancer, Alexa Umbreit embarked with her husband, Mark, on a healing journey that took them through the realm of conventional medicine and beyond. They opened their hearts and minds, drawing strength from complementary therapies and wisdom from the world's faith traditions. In this book, Alexa and Mark share healing techniques, spiritual wisdom, and a profound lesson for individuals and couples facing a serious illness: healing does not mean curing. It means learning to embrace the moment, achieve spiritual wholeness, and strengthen relationships with those we love. Pathways to Spirituality and Healing was published in cooperation with the Center for Spirituality and Healing, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Art and Music
The Gág Family: German-Bohemian Artists in America
by Julie L'Enfant
Afton Historical Society Press
(From the publisher) Rich in visual records—paintings, drawings, and photographs, The Gág Family explores and celebrates one family's remarkable cultural journey from Bohemia to the American Midwest to New York and beyond. After settling in the Minnesota frontier town of New Ulm in 1879, German-Bohemian immigrant Anton Gag established himself as an artist and begat a family business. His oldest daughter and protégé, Wanda, made her reputation in New York as a printmaker and children’s book author and illustrator. Her younger sister Flavia was a prolific writer, illustrator, and painter. Using heretofore unavailable family papers and newly discovered documents, The Gag Family traces the influences of European family traditions on the art of these enterprising artists and places them in the context of American art.

Architecture
Cap Wigington: An Architectual Legacy in Ice and Stone
by David V. Taylor and Paul C. Larson
Minnesota Historical Society Press
(From the publisher) Clarence W. ("Cap") Wigington was a man of firsts—the first registered African American architect in Minnesota and the first African American municipal architect in the nation. The public buildings that he designed for the city of St. Paul are a continuing legacy, helping to define the city's character. And his achievements, both as an architect and as a leader in the state's African American community, are all the more significant given the limitations of the times in which he lived.

Between 1915 and 1947, in the Office of the City Architect of St. Paul, he designed an array of schools, fire stations, park structures, and municipal buildings that continue to define the city's landscape. Three of his buildings—the Highland Park Water Tower (1928), the Holman Airfield Administration Building (1939), and the Harriet Island Pavilion (1941, renamed the Clarence W. Wigington Pavilion in 1998)—are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Wigington's nearly 60 St. Paul buildings now constitute one of the most extensive collections of works by an early African American architect.

Wigington's most ephemeral work, however, may have been his most creative. From 1937 to 1947, he designed six ice palaces and a number of secondary structures for St. Paul's famous Winter Carnival. These stunningly fanciful designs are Wigington's most imaginative and exuberant.

Alternating chapters by Taylor and Larson examine the man, his times, his leadership in the African American community, and his architectural work. Richly illustrated with photos of Wigington's buildings and his drawings, the book also contains a list of works attributed to Wigington. His life story shows the struggles and the achievements of a talented individual facing and conquering long odds.

History, Politics, and Culture
Pale Horse at Plum Run
by Brian Leehan
Minnesota Historical Society Press
(From the publisher) The smoke had just cleared from the last volley of musketry at Gettysburg. Nearly 70 percent of the First Minnesota regiment lay dead or dying on the field—one of the greatest losses of any unit engaged in the Civil War. Pale Horse at Plum Run is the study of this single regiment at this crucial moment in American history. Through painstaking research of firsthand accounts, eyewitness reports, and official records, Brian Leehan constructs a narrative remarkable for its attention to detail and careful reportage.

Word of the First's heroic act at Gettysburg quickly spread along Union lines and back to Minnesota. Their stand late on July 2, 1863, stopped a furious rebel assault and saved the day for the Union. Emerging from the chaos of battle, however, firsthand reports contradicted each other. Confused officers and frightened soldiers told very different stories of the day's hearsay and camp gossip for their sources of information. All of this leaves the historical investigator to ask, what really happened that day at Plum Run?

In order to answer that question, Leehan performs superlative historical detective work. By focusing on the men themselves—and their accounts of the engagement—he weaves together a narrative of the First's action on July 2 and 3. Those who escaped the scythe of battle the first day lived to play a pivotal role the next in rebuffing the most famous infantry assault in American military history, Pickett's Charge. By tracking the movements of individual soldiers over the field of battle, Leehan reconstructs in amazing detail the story of this remarkable band of soldiers.

In his investigation of the battle Leehan raises important questions about how we can really know the truth about the past. In cogent appended essays, the author muses on the lack of standardized timekeeping in the mid-19th century, on the nature of Civil War weaponry, and on the emergence of a heroic mythology after the war.

Education, Teaching, Academic
Ojibwe: Waasa Inaabidaa (We Look in all Directions)
by Thomas M. Peacock and Marlene Wisuri
Afton Historical Society Press
(From the publisher) Waasa Inaabidaa (which translates "we look in all directions") is a uniquely personal history of the Ojibwe nation by Ojibwe educator Thomas Peacock. Illustrated with color and historic black-and-white photographs, artwork, and maps, it is the story of how the Ojibwe people and their ways have continued to survive, and even thrive, from pre-contact times to the present. The story visits contemporary Ojibwe and non-Indian issues, including tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, casino gambling, and education.

"In the story of humankind, different cultures tell parallel stories about the making of this universe. It may never be known if these similarities are a result of a more recent melding of cultures or if the stories have a common beginning in a story that has been passed down in the ancestral memory of many peoples. One example: the ancient Ojibwe story of creation parallels the account in the Book of Genesis."

Gardening, Nature, Environmental
Voices for the Land
photos by Brian Peterson
Minnesota Historical Society Press

Genre
Mortal Prey
by John Sandford
G.P. Putnam's Sons
(From the publisher) Years ago, Lucas Davenport almost died at the hands of Clara Rinker, a pleasant, soft-spoken, low-key Southerner, and the best hitwoman in the business. Now retired and living in Mexico, she nearly dies herself when a sniper kills her boyfriend, the son of a local druglord, and while the boy's father vows vengeance, Rinker knows something he doesn't: The boy wasn't the target-she was-and now she is going to have to disappear to find the killer herself. The FBI and DEA draft Davenport to help track her down, and with his fiancie deep in wedding preparations, he's really just as happy to go-but he has no idea what he's getting into. For Rinker is as unpredictable as ever, and between her, her old bosses in the St. Louis mob, the Mexican druglord, and the combined, sometimes warring, forces of U.S. law enforcement, this is one case that will get more dangerous as it goes along. And when the crossfire comes, anyone standing in the middle won't stand a chance.

Book Cover Design
Daisy Air Rifles & BB Guns: The First 100 Years
Tom Heffron, designer; Ben Saltzman, photographer; Neal Punchard, author
MBI Publishing
(From the publisher) FDaisy Air Rifles and BB Guns looks back fondly on the first 100 years of Daisy BB rifles and pistols, toy and cork guns, accessories, packaging, period advertising and literature. Wacky ads and catalogs conjure grins of pure nostalgia as chapters reveal how Daisy used a combination of savvy business sense and quality products to dominate the market.

Interior Book Design
Impressions Mandi Selisker, designer; Roger Cooper, poet; John Erickson, artist
Beaver's Pond Press
(From the publisher) Impressions is a rich visual experience of photographic images made mostly in Minnesota, but also from around the United States and Sweden, coupled with equally rich literary images in its poetry. The photographs were not made with the poems being known to the photographer; the poems were not "written to" the images, but each extends the emotional impact and explains the other in ways heightening the reading and viewing experience.

Fine Press
New York Revisited
by Ken Auchincloss, art by Gaylord Schanilec
Grolier Club of New York
(From the publisher) In 1915 the Grolier Club commissioned Rudolph Ruzicka, the foremost woodcut artist of his day, to produce a series of illustrations celebrating New York City at a time of rapid, remarkable change. Today, New York is one of the most sought-after of Grolier Club publications. To capture the city at the turn of the 21st century, the Club has commissioned a successor volume. Two and a half years in the making, New York Revisited is a collaboration between noted contemporary woodcut artist Gaylord Schanilec and writer Kenneth Auchincloss, describing the transformations, physical and social, that New York has undergone in the last hundred years, up to and including the cataclysmic events of September 11, 2001. The volume has been designed by Gaylord Schanilec and printed by him at his press, Midnight Paper Sales, in an edition of 200 copies. Grolier Club Fine Printing, New Series No. 3.

Voice (First-time author)
Spilling Clarence
by Anne Ursu
Hyperion
(From the publisher) What if you could suddenly remember everything that ever happened in your life? Would it be a blessing or a curse?

The answer is found in Spilling Clarence. In the fictional town of Clarence, Minnesota, a breakroom microwave sparks a smoky fire at the pharmaceutical factory and triggers a massive chemical spill. Panic-stricken and paralyzed, the townspeople wait until the all-clear signal to assure them everything's back to normal. Except that it isn't. Over the coming days, the citizens of Clarence fall under the spell of a strange and powerful drug that unlocks their memories. They become trapped by their own reminiscences: of love and death, of war and childhood, of family they’ve lost and sins they've committed.

This bittersweet first novel is about the need to remember, and about the bliss of forgetting. Spilling Clarence is a funny, moving story with a truly original premise that introduces the talents of an exciting new writer.

Kay Sexton Award
for outstanding contributions to Minnesota's book community
• John "Jack" Parker, James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota
• Karen Nelson Hoyle, Children's Literature Research Collections, including the Kerlan Collection and the Hess Collection, University of Minnesota

Minnesota Humanities Prize
recognizing contributions to the advancement of the humanities in Minnesota
Senator Paul Wellstone (presented posthumously)

Publicist of the Year
Connie Balcom, MBI Publishing

Publisher of the Year
Gregory M. Britton, Minnesota Historical Society Press