Bookshelf:

Jill Kuhnheim and Jonathan Earle

BYRON CALDWELL SMITH BOOK WINNERS: Jill Kuhnheim, professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and Jonathan Earle, assistant professor of history, are joint winners of the biennial Bryo n Caldwell Smith Book Prize.

Kuhnheim is the author of “Spanish American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century,” a study of poetry in relation to artistic, cultural and technological developments in Latin America. Earle's book “Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854” focuses especially on political events in New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Kuhnheim and Earle will present a lecture at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 21 at the Spencer Museum of Art. A reception and book-signing will follow. The event is free and open to the public.

The $2,000 prize is presented by the Hall Center for the Humanities to authors who live or are employed in Kansas and who have written an outstanding book published in the preceding two years.

The Byron Caldwell Smith Award was established by the bequest of Kate Stephens, an alumna and KU professor of Greek in the 1870s and 1880s, in honor of the dynamic Smith, who taught her Greek language and culture at KU and who died in 1877.