At the Tucson Book Festival today, Western Writers of America announced that Harriet and I would share a prestigious Spur Award for our Pintsized Pioneers: Taming the Frontier, One Chore at a Time.
Pintsized Pioneers took top honors in WWA’s Juvenile Nonfiction category. This is my third Spur Award and Harriet’s first. I am especially proud to share it with her. Though her name has not been on my previous two Spur Awards, she certainly shared in making them possible for me, so I am delighted that she gets the credit she has long deserved.
Pioneering work on the childhood experience in the American West was done by Elliott West. Harriet and I were honored to be seated with Dr. West and his wife Suzanne at WWA’s Spur Awards Banquet last June in Tulsa. They were just delightful.
We shared how his book Growing Up with the Country, originally published in 1989, had inspired us to write Pintsized Pioneers for a young adult audience, and had a delightful evening when he received a Spur Award for Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion. By banquet’s end we had promised Dr. West we would send him the first copy of Pintsized Pioneers when it came out in September. We did and received a gracious note in return.
We are already working on the sequel Pintsized Pioneers at Play: Homemade Frontier Fun and Danger. Originally, the subtitle was just going to be just Homemade Frontier Fun, but as we got into the research we learned it wasn’t all fun on the frontier when it came to play, so we added “and Danger.”
The book’s not written, but the cover’s done so we are including it in this posting. We are aiming for an October or November release.
Thanks to WWA for this great honor and thanks to my co-author Harriet Kocher Lewis for supporting my writing efforts over the years, even if you didn’t always get the credit you deserved. Now you have! We will pick up our Spurs at WWA’s annual meeting in Amarillo this June.
reading Pintsized Pioneers
reading Pintsized Pioneers
[Click on images to enlarge]
