Crown Rock Media, owned by publisher and author Bruce E. Whitacre, has announced that his award-winning 2022 poetry collection, The Elk in the Glade, is now available as an audiobook narrated by acclaimed actor Richard Thomas. The audiobook is available on Audible, Spotify, Google Play, and all other platforms.

Awarded second place in narrative poetry by BookFest 2023, The Elk in the Glade: The World of Pioneer and Painter Jennie Hicks celebrates Whitacre’s great-grandmother, a pioneer girl who went on to become an accomplished landscape painter in 20th century rural Nebraska. Whitacre toured Nebraska in the spring of 2023 to coincide with “Jennie Fitch Hicks: Paintings and Poetry” a special exhibit of Hicks’ work at the Dawson County Historical Museum in Lexington. This was the first museum show of her work.

“It’s a beautiful collection, it’s heartfelt, it’s plainspoken, it’s very moving, it’s funny, and I’m thrilled to be reading it,” said Richard Thomas.

Jennie Fitch Hicks was born in 1879 in Cleveland, Ohio, and moved with her family to Nebraska in the 1880s. After marriage, child-rearing and the untimely death of her husband, she moved to Farnam, Nebraska in the late 1930s and painted more than 1,500 landscapes in oil with 1,000 sold to patrons across the United States, Canada and Britain. She died in 1977. 

Acclaim for Whitacre’s book has come from both the East Coast publishing world, and publications and individuals with Nebraska ties. Publisher’s Weekly BookLife editors noted of their pick, “Side by side with the paintings, Whitacre’s book serves as a deeply personal yet relatable account of one woman’s life and turn-of-the-century lifestyle—and clearly demonstrates why this talented painter and pioneer stands as someone to remember.”

"Bruce E. Whitacre's collection, The Elk in the Glade, is a lovely and loving celebration of his remarkable great-grandmother, Jennie Hicks's, life and art, and an inspiring example of how a woman's artistic discipline gave her the courage and insight to transcend the hardships of the Nebraska frontier," said Ladette Randolph, Editor-in-Chief, Ploughshares

“It’s one family’s story, an intimate portrait full of channeled memories merging into myth, set against a backdrop provided by the self-taught painter whom Whitacre takes as his muse - his own great-grandmother, the prairie matriarch whose dreamy works focused exclusively on an imagined elsewhere,” said Thomas Reese Gallagher, managing editor of the Willa Cather Review.

The audiobook is available on NetGalley for review, and the author can be reached for interviews through Crown Rock Media.

Bruce E. Whitacre, Author

Good Housekeeping, 2024 from Poets Wear Prada, is a BookLife Reviews Editor's Pick. The Elk in the Glade: The World of Pioneer and Painter Jennie Hicks, Crown Rock Media, was also a BookLife Reviews Editors Pick and placed 2nd in Contemporary Poetry at The BookFest Spring 2023. His crown sonnet about the culture of violence won the Nebraska Poetry Society’s 2023 Open Poetry Contest. His poems have appeared in many anthologies and over thirty-five journals. He has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Before devoting full time to writing, he was an arts manager for over 30 years in the New York and national nonprofit theatre, where he helped craft award-winning theatre seasons, and created and funded programs in arts education and equity, diversity and inclusion for major regional theatres. His career began in management, including the World Food Programme in Rome, Italy during the 1980s as it transitioned into the independent, emergency-focused agency that was awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. He graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he was a member of Farmhouse Fraternity and was inducted into the Innocents Society. He holds an MFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is a native of Kearney, Nebraska and lives in New York. More at www.brucewhitacre.com.

Richard Thomas, Narrator

Broadway/Off-Broadway: The Little Foxes (Tony nomination), Our Town, You Can’t Take It with You, Race, Democracy, Incident at Vichy, The Stendhal Syndrome, A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, An Enemy of the People, Tiny Alice, The Front Page, The Fifth of July, many Shakespeare productions, and his professional debut at 7 years old in Sunrise at Campobello on Broadway. National tours: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Humans (Elliott Norton Award) and Twelve Angry Men. Thomas is an Emmy Award-winning actor for his performance in the iconic series The Waltons.  Film: Last Summer, Red Sky at Morning, September 20, 1955, Wonder Boys, Taking Woodstock, The Unforgivable. TV: The Americans, Billions, Tell Me Your Secrets and the Netflix series Ozark.

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