Today's Read - Underwear Basketball?

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L.D. Harkrader’s children’s novel Airball: My Life in Briefs—about a team of no-talent basketball players who will do anything, including play ball in their underwear, to win—has been named a 2006 Kansas Notable Book and is a finalist for the 2006 Thorpe Menn Award.

Kansas Notable Books is a new project of the Kansas Center for the Book at the State Library of Kansas. All Kansas Notable Books represent outstanding books about Kansas or written by a Kansas author and published in the previous year. Airball is one of fifteen books included on this year’s inaugural list of Kansas Notable Books.

The Kansas City, Missouri, branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) presents the Thorpe Menn Award annually to a book by a Kansas City area writer. In addition to Airball, this year’s finalists are Deadlocked by Joel Goldman and Words at Play: Creative Writing and Dramaturgy by Felicia Hardison Londré. The AAUW will announce the winner at an awards luncheon on September 16, 2006, at the Kansas City Central Library. The award is named for Thorpe Menn, a long-time book review editor for the Kansas City Star. Past winners include Nancy Pickard, Jacqueline Guidry, C.W. Gusewelle, and Conger Beasley, Jr.

Recognition by the Kansas Notable Books and Thorpe Menn committees is particularly gratifying to Harkrader because both are regional honors. “I grew up and still live in rural Kansas,” says Harkrader, “and one of my goals in writing Airball was to paint a vivid picture of life in Stuckey, my fictional Kansas town. It’s rewarding when readers tell me, ‘You nailed it. This is exactly what it’s like to live in small-town Kansas.’ These two honors are coming from those same people, the people who live here and—I hope—recognize their home in the pages of my book.”

In the past year, Airball: My Life in Briefs has won the Juvenile Literary Award from the Friends of American Writers, was a Junior Library Guild Selection, and was included in the New York Public Library Best Books for the Teen Age and the Bank Street College Best Books of the Year. Airball is also a Maine Student Book Award nominee.

To find out more about Airball and L.D. Harkrader visit:
www.ldharkrader.com
www.ldharkrader.blogspot.com



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