Buy southern Albertan books for Christmas

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Everyone loves to get a good read for Christmas. Consider supporting your local authors and put Alberta books on your gift-giving and gift-getting lists. There are many to choose from no matter what your interest.

Best of all, your hard earned shopping dollars will truly stay in your own city and province and support your local book industry.

Richard William Stevenson, Lethbridge College english professor, is a well-published poet author of over 25 books, an entertaining performance poet and has been called "a human writing machine" sending out poems and prose all over the world. He was described by the Calgary Herald as delivering "creative poetic resuscitation" with his work and noted as an inspiration to a younger generation of writers as a teacher in Lethbridge. 

His latest adventure is into Juvenille fiction with The Haunting of Amos Manor, about a haunted house and a self-confessed science geek and amateur sleuth, searching for a scientific solution to uncovering the mystery of his family’s new somewhat haunted home.

Jane Harris Zsovan is a Lethbridge author and journalist who also teaches and writes for national and regional periodicals about business, faith, politics and social issues.

Her books include Stars Appearing: The Galts’ Vision of Canada and her latest is Eugenics and the Firewall: Canada’s Nasty Little Secret. Between 1928 and 1972 nearly three thousand citizens were sterilized, lied to, experimented on, and subjected to daily abuse at the hands of provincial staff in Alberta, under the government’s Sexual Sterilization Act, which removed the need to obtain consent to sterilize “mental defectives”.

Between 1928 and 1972 nearly 3,000 citizens were sterilized, lied to, experimented on and subjected to daily abuse at the hands of provincial staff in Alberta.

Calgary author Betty Jane Hegerat is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories.   Her creative non-fiction book, The Boy, is about a mass murder in Alberta in 1959. Her previous title, “Delivery,” was shortlisted for the George Bugnet Prize for Fiction in the 2010 Alberta Literary Awards.

A social worker by profession, Betty Jane now teaches creative writing for Continuing Education at the University of Calgary and for the Alexandra Writers Centre and other venues.

Betty Jane writes from a longstanding fascination with relationships and families and the secrets and lies that bind ordinary lives together.

Hegerat has ties to Lethbridge as her daughter is a librarian here.

 


Coaldale born Lethbridge author Elizabeth McLachlan brings readers stories inspired by her father’s memoirs of life as a rural teacher during the Great Depression of the 1930s, “With Unshakeable Persistence: Rural Teachers of the Depression Era,” was a NeWest Press bestseller.

With “Unfailing Dedication: Rural Teachers in the War Years,” she shares experiences of the brave young people who stepped forward during the Second World War when teachers were so scarce that school districts placed untrained teenagers in country schools to oversee up to nine grades in one room.

McLachlan’s bestselling third book, “Gone But Not Forgotten: Tales of the Disappearing Grain Elevators,” puts a human face on the rapidly vanishing wooden elevators, as she relates true stories of those whose lives and communities revolved around the prairie icons.

An extensive gift-giving shopping list of Alberta author’s books in all genres, for both adults and children is offered by Susan Toy, of Alberta Books Canada, and can
be found at http://islandeditions.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/all-you-need-for-christmas-are-books-by-alberta-authors/

Did you also know that you can by many of these and other great titles at your University of Lethbridge Bookstore? The Bookstore is located in SU210A; Level 2 of the Students' Union Building, is open year round Monday to Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and even offers a free membership program with a 15 per cent discount off on all regularly priced general reading books, http://www.uleth.ca/bookstore/books

— By Michelle Greysen, special to L.A. Beat
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