Buy Them as Holiday Gifts for Your Family and Friends: Support Oregon's Award Winning Authors
Sam Adams
Saying she liked coming to Portland, “where authors are treated like rock stars,” author Pam 
Houston opened the 19th annual Oregon Book Awards I attended last night in Northeast Portland’s recently restored Wonder Ballroom.
“I am in love with Colorado, but when I feel like having an ‘affair,’ I think of the Pacific Northwest,” says Houston.
The Oregon Book Awards, a program of the Portland-based non-profit Literary Arts, “celebrates the state's best writers its most dedicated supporters and lovers of books.”
It was a great event.
And, the winners are:
• Cave Paintings to Picasso: The Inside Scoop on 50 Art Masterpieces by Henry Sayre of Bend won the Eloise Jarvis McGraw Award for Children's Literature. Sayre is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Oregon State University's cascade campus in Bend.
• The Pine Island Paradox by Kathleen Dean Moore of Corvallis won the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction. Moore is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University.
• Barbara LaMorticella of Portland received the Stewart H. Holbrook Award for Outstanding Contributions to Oregon's Literary Life. LaMorticella has been in the Portland' literary world since the mid-1970s. She is currently the co-host of KBOO radio’s “The Talking Earth,” a live program that has brought hundreds of Oregon and national poets to the airwaves.
• A Heart for Any Fate: Westward to Oregon – 1845 by Linda Crew of Corvallis won the Leslie Bradshaw Award for Young Adult Literature. Crew is a tree former who has won awards for her previous book Children Of the River.
• Barry Lopez of Finn Rock won his first Oregon Book Award 18 years ago. He won the H.L. Davis Award for Short Fiction for Resistance, "a set of linked first-person stories about a group of artists who receive an ominous letter from the department of 'Inland Security.'"
• Plague and Fire by James C. Mohr of Eugene won the Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction. Mohr is a history professor at the University of Oregon. His book is about the outbreak of plague in Honolulu in 1900 and the government's response to it by initiating a controlled burning of the immigrant section of that city.
• Carol Brown, a retired teacher from Corvallis who works with the Oregon Reading Association, received the Walt Morey Special Award for Contributions to Young Readers Literature.
• How I Paid for College: Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater by my friend and first-time novelist Marc Acito of Portland (yea!) won the Ken Kesey Award for the Novel. Acito’s book recently was selected as an Editor's Choice by the New York Times and a film based on it is currently in development at Columbia Pictures.
• Leaving by Laton Carter of Eugene won the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Carter has a forthcoming anthology to be published by Oxford University Press.
Mark Doty, Barbara Lounsberry, Lois Lowery, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Jack Weatherford and Mark Winegardner served as the judges for the 19th annual Oregon Book Awards. The Oregon Book Awards is supported in part by the Regional Arts and Cultural Council, a recepient of City of Portland funding.
Support Oregon's authors: For your freinds and family, buy these books as gifts for the upcoming holiday season.
Posted by Sam Adams on November 12, 2005
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