This month starts the award season for writers, and Harriet and I have already been blessed with recognition. It was announced at the Tucson Book Festival today that our jointly authored book Pintsized Pioneers at Play: Homemade Frontier Fun and Danger has earned finalist recognition in the juvenile nonfiction category in Western Writers of America’s 2026 Spur Awards competition.
The “Pintsized” franchise has served us well as Pintsized Pioneers: Taming the Frontier, One Chore at a Time, the first book in the series, earned us a Spur Award and a Will Rogers Gold Medallion for juvenile nonfiction plus a Jean Flynn Honor Award from the Texas Institute of Letters for Best Young Adult Book.
Our latest recognition is Harriet’s second Spur finalist designation, once as an editor and now as an author, and my seventh Spur finalist recognition.
Also this month, both the Georgia Comedy Film Festival and the Portland Comedy Film Festival gave finalist recognition to my script “The Fleecing of Fort Griffin,” for best comedy screenplay. The script is based on my comic novel of the same name.
It’s always an honor to be recognized by your writing peers so this year is starting out well for us with up to a half dozen Bariso Press publishing projects on our 2026 calendar, including the revival of my three-book middle reader series with two new books planned in the series we are dubbing the Old West Critters Collection.
