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Connie Armstrong,
OCB director

1999 Oklahoma Book Award Finalists

Award Winners are marked with an Oklahoma Book Award graphic.

I Have Heard of a Land
Illustrations by Floyd Cooper
Floyd Cooper received a Coretta Scott King Award for his illustrations in Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea. Born and raised in Tulsa, Cooper now lives with his wife and children in West Orange, New Jersey. He often returns to Oklahoma, where his family still lives on the farm his great-grandfather staked in a land run.

Oklahoma Crossroads
Photographs by David Fitzgerald
The official photographer of Aerospace America, and a contributing editor of Oklahoma Today magazine, Fitzgerald was a finalist for the 1994 and 1995 Oklahoma Book Awards for design/illustration. Fitzgerald lives in Oklahoma City.

Turning Toward Home: The Art of Jean Richardson
Designed by Carol Haralson
Caol Haralson is a four-time Oklahoma Book Award winner; she received awards in 1991, 1993, 1997, and 1998. She lived in Tulsa for many years, and now lives in Sedona, Arizona.

Home Run: The Story of Babe Ruth
Illustrations by Michael Wimmer
The Chicago Sun-Times has described Michael Wimmer’s artwork as “reminiscent of some of Norman Rockwell’s best.” Wimmer won the 1995 Oklahoma Book Award for design/illustration for All the Places to Love. He lives with his family in Norman.

The Cold-and-Hunger Dance
by Diane Glancy
A bold and stimulating collection of essays, this volume is an imaginative and honest account of journeys to and from the margins of memory, everyday life, and different cultural worlds. Diane Glancy’s Cherokee heritage and Christian faith empower her to tell several stories at once. Glancy is an associate professor of English at Macalester College.

Euphemism, Spin, and the Crisis in Organizational Life
by Howard F. Stein
This book, about deception and self-deception in and beyond the workplace, focuses on the psychological, ethical, cultural, and spiritual dilemmas that cannot be reduced to a mere business crisis. Howard Stein explores the role of euphemism in the official doctrines and public claims of business, including how people experience the trauma of mass layoffs and turmoil in the workplace. Stein is professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City.

Family Matters, Tribal Affairs
by Carter Revard
A moving memoir by one of our most accomplished Native American poets, Carter Revard dedicates these essays to “those who grow, who build, who keep things working, who have always helped and keep on helping.” Revard, a Rhodes Scholar, is professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. He grew up on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma. Revard received the Oklahoma Book Award in 1994 for poetry.

From Oklahoma To Eternity:
The Life of Wiley Post and the Winnie Mae
by Bob Burke
Bob Burke brings to life the story of one of Oklahoma’s heroes. Part of the Oklahoma Trackmaker Series, published by the Oklahoma Heritage Association, this is the first biography of Wiley Post. Burke was born in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, and now practices law and writes books in Oklahoma City.

Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies:
The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905-1930
by Nigel Anthony Sellars
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical labor union, played an important role in Oklahoma from the founding of the union in 1905 until its demise in 1930. Nigel Sellars describes union efforts to organize migratory harvest hands and oil-field workers. The rise and fall of the IWW in Oklahoma explains much about the failure of the labor movement in the U.S. during the 1920s. Sellars is instructor of history at the University of Oklahoma.

Our Souls to Keep: Black/White Relations in America
by George Henderson
In this personal and practical look at black/white relations in the United States, George Henderson, writing primarily for white Americans, offers a window into black American culture. He discusses race relations frankly and offers practical suggestions for dealing effectively with cultural differences. Henderson is dean of the College of Liberal Studies, and Regents’ Professor of Human Relations, Education and Sociology at the University of Oklahoma.

Red Blood and Black Ink: Journalism in the Old West
by David Dary
Newspapers in the Old West had tremendous influence, oftening directing these societies more than politics. This is an exuberant and evocative account of the roles of journalists and their publications at the turn of the century. David Dary is a native of Kansas, and now is head of the H.H. Herbert School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators
by Gordon Grice
We are brought face to fanged face with the inadequacy of our distinctions between normal and abnormal, dead and alive, innocent and evil, in this collection of essays. Gordon Grice charts the simple brutality of the lives of the predators found in his rural Oklahoma home.

Securing the Fruits of Labor:
The American Concept of Wealth Distribution 1765-1900
by James L. Huston
An examination of beliefs about wealth distribution, leading to the conclusion that Americans’ earliest economic attitudes were formed during Revolutionary times and remained virtually unchanged until the close of the nineteenth century. James Huston is an associate professor of history at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater.

Turning Toward Home: The Art of Jean Richardson
by Joan Carpenter Troccoli
Art historian Joan Troccoli traces Richardson’s development as an artist from her formative period to the present. Included in the volume are more than 250 reproductions of Richardson’s paintings, prints, sculpture, and drawings from childhood. Troccoli is deputy director of the Denver Art Museum and a former director of the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art in Tulsa.

Just a Drop in the Bucket
by Frederick A. Olds
Familial love, nature, pioneers and cowboy days all come into play in Just a Drop in the Bucket. Frederick Olds is a “buckeye” by birth and a “Sooner” by choice. He is sculptor of The Wedding, which celebrates the joining of Oklahoma and Indian Territories to form the new State of Oklahoma. The sculpture stands in front of the Oklahoma Territorial Museum in Guthrie. Olds and his wife, Flo, live near Guthrie.

Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone
by Mark Cox
Mark Cox’s first book, Smoulder, won for him a Whiting Writers’ Award and a Bread Loaf Fellowship. In Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone, the author explores different types of love, and his homey scenes often feature a twist, lending his poetry a bittersweet quality. Cox directs the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University.

Smoldering
by Wendell Graham
Subtitled “Poems of Romance,” Smoldering is a paean to romantic and erotic love. Wendell Graham is currently working on other projects at his home in Oklahoma City, where (the book jacket tells us) “he is visited, occasionally, by a cat named Oreo.”

Broken Chords
by Barbara Snow Gilbert
Barbara Gilbert’s first book, Stone Water, won the 1997 Oklahoma Book Award, and was named a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. Broken Chords is the story of seventeen-year-old Clara Lorenzo, whose coming-of-age experience occurs during a highly charged, internationally renowed piano competition.

Chico & Dan
by Harold Keith
Harold Keith won the Newberry Medal for Rifles for Watie in 1958. In 1997 he received the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book. Just before the publication of Chico & Dan, Mr. Keith died at the age of ninety-four. He was the author of sixteen books, as well as a noted historian, long distance runner, and barber shop quartet singer.

Ethan Between Us
by Anna Myers
Anna Myers is a two-time winner of the Oklahoma Book Award in the children and young adult category. In Ethan Between Us, a jealous young girl betrays her friend, setting in motion a tragic turn of events. A native Oklahoman, Myers lives in Chandler.

The Flimflam Man
by Darleen Bailey Beard
Darleen Beard was inspired by the true story of a flimflam man who bamboozled the town of Wetumka, Oklahoma in 1950. The author lives in Tuttle with her husband, Danny, and their two children, Spencer and Karalee.

The First Starry Night
by Joan Shaddox Isom
Based on Vincent van Gogh’s time in Arles, France, this book tells the story of the painter’s friendship with a young boy named Jacques. Through this unique friendship, Jacques learns a new way to look at the world around him. Isom received her B.A. in Education from the University of Central Oklahoma. Her paintings have won awards in the U.S.A. and Europe.

I Have Heard of a Land
by Joyce Carol Thomas
This Ponca City native has won both the National Book Award and the Coretta Scott King Award. Thomas writes that I Have Heard of a Land “is one story of the journey of African-Americans to a place of hope, a hope connected to the yearning for land—when land was another word for freedom.”

Rough Waters
by S.L. Rottman
Mastering the art of survival—physical and emotional—is the theme of this work by former Oklahoma school teacher S.L. Rottman. The author received the 1998 Oklahoma Book Award for Hero. She now lives in Colorado Springs.

This Land is Your Land
by Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie’s celebratory ballad, written toward the end of the great depression, is also a call for justice and dignity for all of America’s people. With paintings by Kathy Jakobsen, a tribute by Pete Seeger, and sheet music of the chorus, the book becomes a mixed-media experience for children.

A World Away
by Stewart O’Nan
Noted as one of America’s best young writers, this former University of Central Oklahoma professor won the 1997 Oklahoma Book Award for Names of the Dead. In A World Away, universal truths are revealed in a story of one family’s summer during World War II.

Extreme Justice
by William Bernhardt
The Vancouver Sun has dubbed William Bernhardt “the American equivalent of P.G. Wodehouse and John Mortimer.” The bestselling author has made the Book Award’s finalist list six times. He won in 1995 for Perfect Justice. Bernhardt, wife Kirsten, and children Harry and Alice live in Tulsa.

Flutie
by Diane Glancy
Diane Glancy is a poet, essayist and novelist who has won numerous awards, including the first North American Indian Prose Award and the Capricorn Prize for poetry. In Flutie, a young girl finds her voice amidst a hardscrabble life in western Oklahoma. Glancy is also a finalist this year in the Non-Fiction category.

The Freshour Cylindersby Speer Morgan
Suspense, history, and strong storytelling combine in this book that author Robert Olen Butler calls “a splendid achievement.” Action takes place in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Speer Morgan is the author of four novels and a collection of stories. He is currently editor of The Missouri Review.

The Honk and Holler Opening Soon
by Billie Letts
Billie Letts won the 1996 Oklahoma Book Award for Where the Heart Is. That book’s recent selection for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club has brought national fame to this Oklahoma native. The Honk and Holler Opening Soon is another tale of small-town Oklahoma life, and the healing power of love.

Paradise
by Toni Morrison
This Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning author’s Paradise is called “the strangest and most original book that she has written” by The New Yorker. Toni Morrison’s inspiration for this novel was the establishment of Oklahoma’s all-black towns during the late nineteenth century.

To see complete list of 1999 Oklahoma Book Award Winners go here.

The Oklahoma Center for the Book, sponsor of the Oklahoma Book Award competition, is a non-profit, 501-c-3 organization located in the Oklahoma Department of Libraries. Established in 1986 as an outreach program of the Library of Congress, the Oklahoma Center was the fourth such state center formed. It is governed by a volunteer board of directors from across the state.

The mission of the Oklahoma Center for the Book is
to promote the work of Oklahoma authors,
to promote the literary heritage of the state, and
to encourage reading for pleasure by Oklahomans of all ages.