Reading and writing Up North

And now for a little news from Up North:

Sheila Packa has been named Duluth's third poet laureate, succeeding Jim Johnson and Barton Sutter. She will receive an honorarium of $3,000 for her two-year term and will organize five public events. Her inaugural reading will be this fall.

Duluth, Red Wing, St. Paul and Winona each has a poet laureate, and Robert Bly is the state poet laureate.

The 22nd annual Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards will take place from 1:30 to 5 p.m. Sunday in the Kirby Ballroom of the University of Minnesota Duluth. Food writer Beatrice Ojakangas will speak and Sutter will emcee.

Awards will be presented in each of five categories: fiction, poetry, memoir/creative nonfiction, nonfiction and children's literature. Each winner will receive $300 and a plaque.

And, finally, Maureen Gibbon has a new novel out with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. "Thief" is set in Minnesota; it's about a woman who strikes up a correspondence with a prisoner who answers her personal ad. Gibbon is the author of "Swimming Sweet Arrow" and teaches at Bemidji State University. Her publication reading will be at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Loft Literary Center, 1011 Washington Av. S., Minneapolis.

Also ...

•"Nature and Revelation: A History of Macalester College," by Jeanne Halgren Kilde, will be published in June by the University of Minnesota Press. Kilde is the director of the religious studies program at the University of Minnesota and has written several books.

•Look who's on the cover of the Penguin Young Readers summer catalog! It's Olive, the character from Jacqueline West's "The Shadows." West lives in Red Wing, and this is the first book in her new series, "The Books of Elsewhere."

•"Other Americas," a collection of poetry by Richard Robbins, has been published by Blueroad Press of Janesville, Minn. Robbins directs the creative writing program at Mankato State University.

•Savage Press of Superior, Wis., has republished "A Life in Two Worlds" by Betty Powell Skoog, written with Justine Kerfoot. Powell was an Irish-Ojibwe woman who was raised by her Ojibwe grandmother in the 1920s.