janice northerns
2021 Byron Caldwell Smith
Book Award for Poetry
(University of Kansas)
2021 Nelson Poetry Book Award
(Kansas Authors Club)
2021 WILLA Literary Award Finalist
in Poetry
“Some Electric Hum reads … like a treatise on the ways communities are crafted by wanting, having, and then letting go. … This book exemplifies her skill in giving language to those fragile and ephemeral experiences of connection, as well as her determination to understand how connection might be felt in the barely perceptible hum of a completed circuit, closed but still alive with alternating electric currents.“
—KAC Contest Judge Dr. Sandra Cox
“Janice Northerns' debut collection disentangles the gnarled branches of a family tree into poems of complicated love and endurance. Deeply engaged with place, these poems range across Texas to Kansas to hold up the objects and people that created a personal history and ‘grapple with words just west of the tongue.’ Intimate and invested in the lives of others, Northerns crafts narratives of tenderness and survival, reminding us all it's always possible to move forward and carry our stories with us.”
—Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
Lamar University Literary Press, 2020
About the Author
Janice Northerns
Janice Northerns grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor's and master's degrees from Texas Tech University. After teaching college and high school English for many years, she recently took early retirement to devote more time to writing. She currently lives in southwest Kansas with her husband, Bill McGlothing. An award-winning poet, Northerns' work has been published widely in journals such as The Chariton Review, descant, The Laurel Review, Roanoke Review, Southwestern American Literature, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. Some Electric Hum is her first full-length poetry collection.
