Run, Little Chaski! An Inka Trail Adventure
by Mariana Llanos
Barefoot Books

Funny Fani’ is a thoughtfully-designed children’s book with fun, appealing typefaces, and bold coloring. Creative choices are shared throughout by the author, illustrator, and book designer. Just one example cited by judges is the glossary with its facts about animals and their relationship to Chickasaw traditions. Hinson, the illustrator, draws dozens of animals with a sweet balance between whimsy and realism. The title protagonist stands out as an amiable cartoon squirrel with oversized features—big black eyes and a wide grin revealing a solitary pair of incisors. Each page is full of activity and multiple characters, ensuring the reader a fun adventure as they learn about Chickasaw words and culture. Fetters is graphic design manager for the Chickasaw Nation in Ada, Oklahoma, and is a two-time Oklahoma Book Award winner. Hinson creates art within the Chickasaw Nation. This is his second time as a finalist.

The arresting outer cover presents a cropped, off-center closeup of a flint clay effigy depicting a brooking man. Underneath the dust jacket, a textured cover board has been lightly embossed with a gold line drawing and title. Inside the book, black pages emphasize chapter titles set in warm, golden brown all-caps type. The opening page of each chapter has a drop cap colored with the same golden brown and matching the height of the chapter title. All pages have text set in a large line length or measure close to the binding leaving a lavish amount of white space along the outer edge of pages. Even with the meticulous handling of text, the highlight of the book is the numerous, handsomely photographed Spiro artifacts. In addition, two-page spreads are scattered through the book featuring artworks by “descendants of the Mississippian people.” These vividly colored sections offer an unexpected and refreshing contrast to the antiquities while providing an important continuity of Native American art of the past and present. Singleton was a contributor to the 2010 Non-fiction Oklahoma Book Award winning anthology Thomas Gilcrease. He is curator of ethnology at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Allred is a book designer in Oxford, North Carolina.

Small-town journalist Claire Northcutt travels old Route 66 to Persimmon, Oklahoma, where she intends to research the Mother Road. Soon she senses a cover-up in the small town, as she perceives Persimmon is plagued with either toxic pollution, meth production, or both. Holt Braden, an undercover DEA agent and Claire’s boyfriend, also is in town. He has been assigned to protect Renee Trammel, who is in the Witness Protection Program awaiting to testify against a brutal Texas drug ring. Both Claire and Renee’s lives intersect when they provoke the wrath of criminals, intent on evil pursuits. Can the two women, with Holt’s assistance, prevent a looming disaster in this small community? This is Coley’s eighth mystery-suspense novel. She received the Tony Hillerman Award at the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards. She has twice been named an Oklahoma Book Award fiction finalist. She splits her time writing in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Tulsa.

Hightower explores the life and career of Bill Price, U.S. Attorney and Republican candidate for high office, who spearheaded prosecutions in the most pervasive public corruption spectacle in Oklahoma and American history: the County Commissioner scandal. The author argues Price’s career in law and politics serves as a portal into corruption in Oklahoma. Hightower’s book includes such scandals as land swindles; theft of Native American property and the Osage murders; The 1964–65 Oklahoma Supreme Court; Oklahoma State Treasurer Leo Winters; Governor David Hall’s extortion trial; drug syndicates; and the Penn Square Bank insiders. Moreover, Price shatters the myth that Oklahomans are tolerant of, and susceptible to, corruption. Hightower’s book 1889: The Boomer Movement, the Land Run, and Early Oklahoma City was a 2018 Oklahoma Book Award non-fiction finalist. He splits his time between Oklahoma City, and Charlottesville, Virginia.

In these sensitive times, and in this unique place where so many of us find ourselves—unnerved, fearful, and aware we are not at peace—Hada’s ninth poetry collection arrives like a salve to remind us there is good and beauty in the natural world that surrounds us. Often composed on his back deck in rural Pottawatomie County, the poems let us into the poet’s world to inspire our own joy and appreciation of the wonders that are—wonders that reside both inside and outside of us. Hada is a professor at East Central University in Ada, where he directs the annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival. He was awarded the Oklahoma Center for the Book’s Glenda Carlile Distinguished Service Award for his creation and stewardship of that festival.

This richly illustrated volume, featuring more than 175 photographs, along with oral testimonies, shines a new spotlight on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre from the vantage point of its victims and survivors. Hill presents a range of photographs (some are published here for the first time) taken before, during, and after the massacre, mostly by white photographers. Comparing these photographs to those taken elsewhere in the United States of lynchings, the author makes a powerful case for terming the 1921 outbreak not a riot, but a massacre. Despite all the violence and destruction, Black Tulsans rebuilt the Greenwood district brick by brick. This photographic history offers a perspective largely missing from other accounts. Hill is the author of Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory and The Murder of Emmett Till: A Graphic History. He lives in Norman, Oklahoma.