Huge congratulations to Caroline Kurtz! Her memoir A Road Called Down on Both Sides: Growing up in Ethiopia and America was recently awarded the Best First Book Award by the Presbyterian Writers Guild! The award honors the best debut by a Presbyterian author written during 2018-2019. Caroline’s thoughtful memoir of her life as the child of missionaries explores faith, family, and what it means to find home when you’ve grown up between cultures and continents. We couldn’t be prouder.
Caroline isn’t the only Kurtz sister in the winner’s circle right now. This year, the Writers Guild has also awarded Jane Kurtz the 2020 Distinguished Writer Award in honor of her career as a writer and literary advocate. Jane has published over 35 children’s books, and with Caroline, founded Ready Set Go Books, a publishing company that produces books for young readers in English and three Ethiopian languages.
As the award ceremony, like many other events, has been postponed, the Kurtz sisters have recorded their acceptance speech, which you can see below. Congratulations to both Caroline and Jane!
Transcript
Jane
We are pleased and delighted—or, as our mom would have said, tickled pink—that we each got an award from the Presbyterian Writers Guild this year.Caroline
After all, we’ve been at home in the Presbyterian Church from the time we learn to walk.Jane
Our dad never dreamed of becoming a Presbyterian minister.Caroline
He grew up poor on a farm in Eastern Oregon. They burned sagebrush in the winter to keep warm. There was no church, only a Presbyterian Sunday school.Jane
World War Two changed his life forever. He said that when he got back, the world was on his heart.Caroline
I was born while he was in seminary in Pittsburgh…Jane
and I was born when he was a young minister in Portland, Oregon.Caroline
Meanwhile, the emperor Haile Selassie had returned to Ethiopia to find that the Italian occupation had killed a whole generation of educated Ethiopians. And so he invited Presbyterians to expand their work in Ethiopia.
JaneOur mom and dad decided that was an amazing opportunity. Here we are in England on the way–and notice that I am on a leash.
Caroline
Notice that I am not.Jane
Nobody solicited our opinion about going to Ethiopia.Caroline
But we loved our childhood in Ethiopia, especially after we moved to Maji.Jane
In Maji, the Presbyterians ran a clinic and a school–but we didn’t go to that school. Instead, we learned to read from our mom who loved to read. So we learned to love reading also.Caroline
She also taught us the love of the writing life, and stories. We made up stories in all of our play.Jane
Everything had a plotline.Caroline
We made up stories and used our imaginations in one of the most beautiful spots on God’s Earth.Jane
I won the distinguished writer award because I’ve published more than 40 books. A lot of them connect with my childhood in Ethiopia. I also drew on my life as a preacher’s kid (and my kids’ lives as preacher’s kids). This novel for young readers is set in Kansas where my Presbyterian minister husband grew up. One year, American Girl asked me to write stories for their doll of the year, and they wanted the character to be a girl who loved science and who wanted to save the Earth. I thought about my own childhood in Maji, loving the Earth. And that helped me create Lanie who realizes the power of her own backyard to save birds and bees and butterflies. And then when I moved back to Portland, I started my own backyard habitat project, which helped me with this novel for young readers and also with my newest picture book: What Do They Do With All That Poo?Caroline
Meanwhile, Mom and Dad worked in Ethiopia for 23 years, until His Majesty was deposed in 1970. I went back to Ethiopia to teach in the 1990s. I was the only non-Ethiopian teacher immersed in the culture, making friends, and learning the language of Amharic. What a great follow-up to my childhood there. I wrote about both the fun parts and the scary parts in my memoir, A Road Called Down on Both Sides. In 1996, my family was transferred, and my husband and I worked with the Presbyterian Church of Sudan. I taught teachers, worked with women, and did the logistics organizing for a peace conference between chiefs and community leaders in South Sudan. That gave me the material for my second book. Now, I’m collaborating with the community in Maji again, this time with my own non nonprofit. I’m bringing women’s development. I’m introducing solar electricity to run water pumps, light operating rooms, keep vaccines cold and brighten family homes at night. So, for me, the adventure in Ethiopia continues.Jane
I didn’t go back to Ethiopia as an adult until 1997. I was living in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and that year, we were hit by a terrible flood. When the Presbyterian Church was recovering from the flood, the Session–which I was on–decided that we needed some kind of a project to turn our eyes out to the world. And that’s how I came to help start the nonprofit Ethiopia Reads. When two of my children were in college, they volunteered in Ethiopia for Ethiopia Reads, and that’s how I ended up with Ethiopian American grandchildren…so I’ve gotten to see a love of reading ripple on into the next generation.You know, Caroline and I learned how to read in English. All people love their own languages. And if you can learn to read in your own mother tongue, it makes a huge difference. Knowing that is what led to our newest project together called Ready, Set Go books, which is sponsored by a nonprofit in Seattle, Open Hearts Big Dreams. We kind of dreamed up the idea in 2016 when we were traveling with some other writers and some artists down to Maji. We brainstormed together how to create books that would show children their lives in Ethiopia–that would be in their own local languages–and that would show them the power of books to change lives.
It’s been an amazing collaboration. We’ve worked with Ethiopian artists and writers This is an illustrator who has illustrated two Bible stories that were sponsored by an Ethiopian American Orthodox group. And he also illustrated a book about a time when some of the world’s great religions first came to Ethiopia. We’ve worked with parents and translators; we’ve worked with community leaders; we’ve worked with people who will share our books with children in the United States and Europe and Canada and in Ethiopia. And we also shared the project with our own church in Portland. That church has a lively arts program and they helped with some of the illustrations for the Ready, Set, Go Books, and learned to connect with kids in Ethiopia. This project is our thank-you–a reading thank-you–to a place where we learned how to read and learned to love reading.
Caroline
Janie and I have been companions and collaborators pretty much all of our lives during the good times… during the awkward times (on furlough in Boise, Idaho)…and up to the present. We have had a life full of adventure and companionship very much due to the Presbyterian Church and our connection with Ethiopia.Jane
And getting these awards is a little bit like getting ice cream on the pie.Jane and Caroline
Thank you.
