Riverfront Readings featuring Cheryl Unruh, Jim Hoy, and William Sheldon

Please join us for our February 10th Zoom reading featuring Cheryl Unruh, Jim Hoy, and William Sheldon.

To attend, please register for the reading at http://bitly.ws/z2mj, and you will be provided with the information needed to join the reading.

Cheryl Unruh grew up in the tiny town of Pawnee Rock in central Kansas. Much of her writing is about Kansas, about a sense of place. For 11 years, Cheryl wrote a weekly column called Flyover People for The Emporia Gazette. She received the Kansas Notable Book Award for her collections of Kansas essays, Flyover People: Life on the Ground in a Rectangular State (2010), and Waiting on the Sky: More Flyover People Essays (2014), both published by Quincy Press. Meadowlark Press published her collection of poetry, Walking on Water (2017), and Gravedigger’s Daughter: Vignettes from a Small Kansas Town (2021), a memoir. Cheryl is the editor of 105 Meadowlark Reader, a Kansas journal of creative nonfiction. She lives in Emporia, Kansas, with her husband and three cats.

Jim Hoy was reared on a small ranch in the Flint Hills. He attended the University of Kansas and Kansas State University for his undergraduate work, Emporia State University for his Masters degree and the University of Missouri at Columbia for a Doctorate in Medieval and Renaissance English Literature. He retired from the classroom in 2014 and he has published 19 books. He is working on number 20. He has served as president of the Kansas State Historical Society, the American Association of Australian Literature Studies, and as chair of the board of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Last April he received a Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

William Sheldon lives with his family in Hutchinson, Kansas where he teaches and writes. He took his BS and MA in English from Emporia State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Wichita State University. His poetry and prose have been published widely in such journals as Blue Mesa Review, Columbia, Epoch, New Letters, Quiddity, and Prairie Schooner. He is the author of three books of poetry, Retrieving Old Bones (Woodley, 2002), Rain Comes Riding (Mammoth, 2011), and Deadman (Spartan, 2021), as well as a chapbook, Into Distant Grass (Oil Hill, 2009). Retrieving Old Bones was a Kansas City Star Noteworthy Book for 2002 and is listed as one of the Great Plains Alliance’s Great Books of the Great Plains. He plays bass for the band The Excuses.