The Society of Midland Authors held its 93rd annual banquet and awards presentation on May 13 in Chicago. Midwest authors honored included Patricia Hampl, Adult Nonfiction winner, for The Florist's Daughter; Barbara Oakley, Adult Fiction finalist, for Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend; and Marlene Targ Brill, Children's Nonfiction finalist, for Marshall "Major" Taylor: World Champion Bicyclist, 1899-1901.

The literary journal Crazyhorse awarded Miranda Beverly-Whittemore its annual fiction prize for her story "Pertussis." She received $3,000 and publication in Crazyhorse No. 74, due out in November.

The Publishing Triangle, the association of lesbians and gay men in publishing, awarded Peter Cameron with a Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction for Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. The award is funded and administered by the Ferro-Grumley Foundation in memory of the novelists Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley, and honors culture-driving fiction from LGBT points of view. The winners of the Publishing Triangle's annual awards were announced at a ceremony on April 28 in New York.

ForeWord Magazine awarded Carol Hoenig the 2007 Gold award in the Books on Writing category for The Author's Guide to Planning Book Events. The awards were announced in May at the Book Expo America conference in Los Angeles.

J. David Markham's book Imperial Glory: The Bulletins of Napoleon's Grande Armée 1805-1814 was recently awarded the 2007 Count Las Cases Memorial Prize for Napoleonic Literature in English from the Instituto Napoleónico México-Francia, the first time the award has been given to an English-language book.

Tom Miller was designated "un Huésped Ilustre"-an illustrious guest-by the city of Quito, Ecuador, during a conference May 28-29 on the late author Moritz Thomsen, whom Miller wrote about in The Panama Hat Trail.

The Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy presented Lillian Morrison with the J. Owen Grundy History Award for her 1967 volume of poetry, The Ghosts of Jersey City & Other Poems. The award recognizes work that chronicles Jersey City history through a written or visual medium and was presented at the eighth annual Preservation Awards ceremony on May 28 at the Landmark Loew's Jersey Theatre in Jersey City.

Diana Kwiatkowski Rubin's poems "Swamp Vision" and "Waves at Wildwood Crest" were among the winners of the 14th annual Joyce Indik New Jersey Wordsmith Competition, sponsored by the Unlimited Potential Theater Company (UPTCo), part of VSA arts of New Jersey. The winning poems were performed at the New Jersey Readers' Theater.

Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten, by Joseph Slate, has been selected for the 2008 edition of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, a program that provides a free book each month to every child in Tennessee under the age of five. The Omaha Theater Company, the third largest professional children's theater company in the nation, is producing a musical based on the book, which will tour in 2009.

Romantic Times magazine named Janelle Williams Taylor a Romance Pioneer in honor of her career as one of the genre's pioneers. She is the author of 50 books, including nine New York Times bestsellers, with more than 50 million copies of her books in print worldwide.

The Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library Committee presented the 2007 June Franklin Naylor Award for the Best Book for Children on Texas History to Paul Robert Walker for Remember the Alamo: Texians, Tejanos, and Mexicans Tell Their Stories. The award was announced at the 117th Annual Convention of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas on May 16 in San Antonio. ✦