Margaret Koger announces that her book, If Seasons Were Kingdoms, was listed as winner of Honorable Mention in the Idaho Library Association 2024 Idaho Book of the Year Award.
We’d previously posted Margaret’s Idaho Author Interview in October 2022.
Here is the full press release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
It is with great pleasure that we announce the winners of the 2024 Idaho Book of the Year Award! (It is the 2024 award because that is the year the books were published).
2024 Book of the Year Winner
Wild and Distant Seas, by Tara Karr Roberts. Lyrical language, evocative imagery, and careful attention to detail set this book apart as easily the finest example of literature in this year’s submissions. From Nantucket to Boston, from Brazil to Florence, and even to the wilds of Moscow, Idaho, in the early years of the twentieth century, the tale follows four generations of women, all gifted with slightly different abilities to see into the minds of others, and all impacted by the lies and half-truths they choose to protect themselves or their daughters.
One Honorable Mention title was chosen as well.
If Seasons Were Kingdoms, by Margaret Koger. [bold added] This slim volume of 46 poems is filled with images of nature found plentifully in Idaho. In the poems are deer, pheasant, salmon, shore birds, wildflowers, bears, and many other creatures and growing things. But there is a human presence also, an observer who loves the natural world and is changed by encounters with it. Koger’s poems speak to the human condition, and our connection to the natural world through its rhythms.
There will be a special session at the annual Idaho Library Association conference on 2 August 2025 in Idaho Falls, where the authors will discuss their books. They will also be honored at the awards banquet that evening.
Kathryn Lopez Luker, committee chair
Helen Bertram, committee member
Maggie Dumont, committee member
Marina Rose, committee member
Eliza Schmidt, committee member
Melissa Searle, committee member
