KU alumna named best poet of 2004

Kansas University alumna Muriel T. Stackley received the 2004 Nelson Poetry Book award at the Kansas Authors’ Club Centennial Conference banquet in Topeka.

The award recognized the best book of poetry for 2004. Stackley’s “Oracle of the Heart Revised and Expanded” combines four decades of poems of celebration, grief, love and humor. The foreword to the second edition indicates some of the poems resulted from her Master of Fine Arts work at KU in the mid-1960s.

Many of the poems are about grief and outrage, whether about lives devastated by Huntington’s disease, her own bouts with cancer or about war and nuclear weapons.

Compilation of bad jobs can make yours look good

New York — Plenty of people are looking for better jobs. But there are worse jobs, too.

Some of them are described in “50 Jobs Worse Than Yours” (Bloomsbury) by Justin Racz.

Along with substitute teacher, gravedigger, skipper of a garbage barge are jobs one might not have known existed. But somebody has to do them.

“50 Jobs” is published by Bloomsbury in hardcover at $14.95.