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MEDIA RELEASE CONTACT: 11 July 2008 Shari Nault [PHONE REDACTED] [EMAIL REDACTED] PARMLY BILLINGS LIBRARY ANNOUNCES EMERITUS AWARD WINNER Gary Ferguson has been named the 2008 Emeritus Award Writer, one of the annual High Plains Book Awards sponsored by the Parmly Billings Library. The ceremony and banquet is scheduled for Friday, October 17, 2008, in Billings and the public is encouraged to attend. Information is available at www.billings.lib.mt.us. Other High Plains Book Awards to be announced at the Awards Banquet include winners in Best Fiction, Best Nonfiction and Best First Book categories and the Zonta Woman Writer Award. The theme of this year’s event is “The Call of the Wild” from Jack London’s classic adventure story. Concurrent with the Parmly Billings Library Book Awards is the 6th annual High Plains BookFest sponsored by the YMCA Writer’s Voice and the Billings Cultural Partners. For information on the BookFest contact Corby Skinner [EMAIL REDACTED] Sue Hart, MSU-Billings Professor of English, nominated Ferguson for the Emeritus Award. “Gary would be deserving of the High Plains Emeritus Writer Award regardless of the BookFest theme,” Hart stated. “But the minute I heard this year’s theme would be “The Call of the Wild,” I thought of all his wonderful books that have the word ‘wild’ in their titles— and how many of those books speak so directly to human interaction with the wild, not just today, but from the first time humans ventured into the western area of the United States. Walking Down the Wild was my introduction to his work—what a wonderful book! And then there are other “wild” titles: Shouting at the Sky: Troubled Teens and the Promise of the Wild; and Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone, the 2005 Montana Book of the Year, in which he writes of how reintroduction of the wolf into the nation’s first National Park ‘allows us to more fully embrace the true wonders of the wild.’ The best thing about Gary, though, is that, in addition, to being a wonderful writer, he’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever known.” ---PAGE BREAK--- Ferguson’s other works include Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone, winner of the Nonfiction Book of the Year Award from both the Mountains and Plains and the Pacific Northwest Book Sellers Associations; Through the Woods; The Sylvan Path and The Great Divide: The Rocky Mountains in the American Mind, that Hart notes, is a “biography” (if such is possible about place rather than person) of a place that Ferguson tantalizes the imaginations of city dwellers ‘desperate for images of someone astride a horse, riding through open country, free and confident.’” Ferguson is also an acclaimed and popular public speaker on a variety of topics, and has taught at the University of Montana as a Distinguished Visiting Writer, and in 2002, he was the Seigel Scholar at the School of Political Science at Washington University. He lives and writes in Red Lodge. The Parmly Billings High Plains Books Awards have been established to recognize regional authors and/or literary works which examine and reflect life on the High Plains including the states of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, and Kansas, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. -The End-