Acceptances and Sales
DAVID ROPER now has a paperback version of Horsefly Hank and the Osage War Shield. He recently published an account of his family’s 1974 50-day tour of Europe: Europe on 5-10 Nervous Breakdowns a Day. His picture book The Little Old Man, The Little Old Woman, and The Little Red Hen is scheduled for publication in September by Doodle and Peck Publishing. He has a three little worms story scheduled for the April 2017 issue of Highlights High Five: “The Magic Words.” High Five recently purchased another story: “Why Mortimer Wears Glasses.”
Contest Winnings
BARBARA SHEPHERD won 1st place in the 2015 Poetry Society of Oklahoma Annual Contest with “In the Land of Make Believe.” She won 2nd place in Adult Fiction in the 2016 Christian Writers Fellowship Annual Writing Contest in Kansas with the story “Mail Order Bride.” In the same contest, she won 2nd in Poetry with “November Ice,” 2nd in Children’s Fiction with “Hear Me On the Radio,” and 3rd in Children’s Non-Fiction with “Wacky Animals from A to Z.” She won awards in the Arkansas Writers’ Conference 2016 contest: 1st Place for a poem (“The Journey”), 1st Place for a short story (“Daffodil Waltz”), 2nd Place for a 6-word short story (“Divorce”), 2nd Honorable Mention for a short story (“Granny’s Gift”).
Profession Activities
BARBARA SHEPHERD attended the SCBWI conference in May, co-hosted the Fiction Writers Retreat on June 4, and was again juried into the Woody Guthrie Poetry. She read poetry at St. Benedict’s in Shawnee; wrote press releases for Oklahoma City Writers, Wordwrights–OKC Christian Writers, and Mid-Oklahoma Writers; wrote and published a newsletter for Wordwrights; and made a trip to south Texas for research related to her newest screenplay.