Winners in Friends of the Jacksonville Public Library’s annual Author of the Year contest gather for photos during a reception in their honor. They included Hannah Garman (from left) and Emmanuel Mupeta Kabula, who tied for second in the prose category; Leslie Carmean, second in poetry; Heather Crivilare, first in prose; Lydia Tosh, first in prose; and Hayden Hamel, first in poetry. Shirley Bilyeu won third place in the poetry division.
Angela Bauer/Journal-Courier
Friends of the Jacksonville Public Library celebrated words and the authors who write them during a reception honoring the group’s Author of the Year contest winners.
“We like to showcase writing and the talent in our community,” said Siobhan Warren, a Friends member and part of the contest committee. “Friends of the Library are interested in supporting not only reading but the written word, in general. This allows people of all ages — we have high school students ages 16 all the way through senior citizens to participate in this. It allows people, especially those who are no longer in school, to practice their writing skills and to show off their ability and allow other people to see the good ideas and the writing they have inside of them.”
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Cash prizes were awarded Thursday to the top finishers in poetry and prose divisions of the competition.
Hayden Hamel reads his poem, “A Conversation with the Night,” after winning first place in the poetry division of Friends of the Jacksonville Public Library’s Author of the Year contest. Winners in both the poetry and prose divisions were honored Thursday during a reception at the library.
Angela Bauer/Journal-Courier
Hayden Hamel, 18, and a senior at Routt Catholic High School, won first place in the poetry division with his poem, “A Conversation with the Night.”
“I wrote it last year, probably about exactly a year ago,” Hamel said. “I was going through a pretty dark time then, and I started to come toward the end of it. So my poem is pretty dark … but at the end there’s just that last line of hope in it. It was just kind of something I wrote in one sitting and was just very quick. I think it was just a culmination of emotions I was feeling.”
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Hamel, who has enlisted in the Air National Guard and been accepted to the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, where he intends to pursue a degree in global studies, also entered the prose competition with a story about the differing perspectives of a military general and a soldier.
Binders available at the front desk at Jacksonville Public Library contain copies of past years’ winners of Friends of the Jacksonville Public Library’s Author of the Year contest.
Angela Bauer/Journal-Courier
Lydia Tosh, 20, and a Lincoln Land Community College-Jacksonville student, also focused on hope in her third-place prose entry. Her story, inspired as a counterpoint to a work by “dirty realism” writer and poet Raymond Carver, tells of a young person whose dreams for the future have been derailed. As a result, the day-to-day grind of working in a dead-end job is taking its toll.
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Carver “wrote about blue-collar depression and his short stories rarely ended well,” Tosh said. “He believed that it was more comforting for someone in a bad situation to read about the world as it was rather than having lofty morals or good endings. … I don’t agree with his thinking. I believe that the world’s not all bad. It’s not all good, either, but it’s not all bad. I believe even people in the worst situations … everyone has at least some moment of hope.”
Other winners in the poetry category were Leslie Carmean, second place; and Shirley Bilyeu, third place.
Heather Crivilare reads her entry in the prose division of Friends of the Jacksonville Public Library’s Author of the Year contest. Winners in both the poetry and prose divisions were honored Thursday during a reception at the library.
Angela Bauer/Journal-Courier
Other winners in the prose category were Heather Crivilare, first place; and Emmanuel Mupeta Kabula and Hannah Garman, tied for second place.
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First-place winners received $250, second place earned $100 and third place took home $50, with prizes furnished by The Farmers State Bank and Trust Co.
Crivilare’s winning short entry covered a relatable experience — the “very mixed feelings you have when someone you’re related to passes away that you had a difficult relationship with. You don’t always grieve the way you think you would grieve.”
Kabula’s story has a less familiar setting — Nigeria rather than west-central Illinois — though it carries a similar theme of how people deal with loss, whether shutting it away or carrying it with them, he said.
The diversity of voices — the contest’s rules stipulate only that the authors and poets be at least 16 and a Morgan County resident — is a large part of the appeal, Warren said.
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A table display touts Friends of the Jacksonville Public Library during a reception for its Author of the Year contest winners. Winners in both the poetry and prose divisions were honored Thursday evening during a reception at the library.
Angela Bauer/Journal-Courier
“We have a couple of high school students, some people out of high school and not as many adults” this year, Warren said. “Last year we had a retiree who was in his 80s all the way down to a 16-year-old. That was especially fun to have the full gamut of ages in the competition.”
The writing competition is a tradition for the Friends group and one not expected to end anytime soon, she said.
“We enjoy doing this,” Warren said. “We always have a full slate of judges and many people who enter the competition. We always feel kind of worried — are people going to turn things in, are they going to write poems? But there are always many, many to judge between. There’s so much talent in our community, and we enjoy seeing all of it and giving a place for people to showcase their work.”
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Longtime Friends of the Library volunteer Don Pigg, 90, also was honored during the evening. Pigg is retiring — again, as he put it — from the Friends board after so many years of volunteering that no one could pinpoint a start date.
Board Vice President Mary Lou Lael also credited Pigg for helping to start the library’s children’s garden and a longtime nature series for adults at the library.
“I really don’t know how we will fill Don’s garden shoes,” Lael said, “because Don spends so many extra hours — other than the time that we’re with the children — watering and weeding, which can really get out of control really fast.”
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The competition’s winning entries — this year’s and past year’s — are collected in binders at the library’s main circulation desk for anyone wanting to read them.