Agee's BONES OF PARADISE wins Nebraska Book Award for fiction

Jonis Agee's latest work, The Bones of Paradise: A Novel, was awarded first place in fiction for the 2017 Celebration of Nebraska Books. She will be honored October 21 at an awards presentation ceremony at the Nebraska State History Museum, 131 Centennial Mall North, in downtown Lincoln. Winners of the 2017 Nebraska Book Awards will be honored and the celebration will include readings by some of the winning authors, designers and illustrators of books with a Nebraska connection published in 2017.

Among those receiving honors is Daryl Farmer, whose short story collection was named a Fiction Honor Book. Farmer received his MA and PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and currently teaches in the MFA program at the Unviersity of Alaska in Fairbanks.

The Celebration of Nebraska Books is sponsored by Nebraska Center for the Book and Nebraska Library Commission, with support from the Nebraska State Historical Society's Nebraska History Museum. Humanities Nebraska provides support for One Book One Nebraska. The Nebraska Center for the Book is housed at the Nebraska Library Commission and brings together the state's readers, writers, booksellers, librarians, publishers, printers, educators, and scholars to build the community of the book, supporting programs to celebrate and stimulate public interest in books, reading, and the written word. The Nebraska Center for the Book is supported by the national Center for the Book in the Library of Congress and the Nebraska Library Commission.

The Bones of Paradise is a multigenerational family saga is set in the unforgiving Nebraska Sand Hills in the years following the massacre at Wounded Knee. "A kaleidoscopic portrait of misfits, schemers, chancers, and dreamers, Agee’s bold new novel is a panorama of America at the dawn of a new century," writes publisher Harper Collins. "A beautiful evocation of this magnificent, blood-soaked land—its sweeping prairies, seas of golden grass, and sandy hills, all at the mercy of two unpredictable and terrifying forces, weather and lawlessness—and the durable men and women who dared to tame it. Intimate and epic, The Bones of Paradise is a remarkable achievement: a mystery, a tragedy, a romance, and an unflagging exploration of the beauty and brutality, tenderness and cruelty that defined the settling of the American West."