Book signing at the OK Territorial Museum‏

The Oklahoma Territorial Museum, 406 E. Oklahoma Ave., will host author Jerry Wilson with a book signing for his novel, Across the Cimarron on Saturday, April 2 from 1-3 p.m.  Light refreshments will be served by the Friends of the Guthrie Museum Complex.

Per his publisher Mongrel Press, “The book takes readers back to the Land Run days of Oklahoma—the novel is historically accurate, culturally sensitive, and based in part on stories and legends from the author’s ancestors. In this novel, Wilson explores the contested meanings of the settlement of Oklahoma, the lives of white, black and Native Americans in the Twin Territories, and the struggle to find a place to call home.

Novelist Brad McLelland, author of Bruisers, says of Across the Cimarron, that “like the Cimarron River itself, Jerry Wilson’s novel teems with life and beauty and movement. Across the Cimarron bears you along on the currents of Time and Memory, and begs you to ponder one of the most fundamental questions of human existence: “How deep is your claim to the earth?”

Jerry Wilson was born west of the Cimarron River in Oklahoma, near the homesteads two of his great grandfathers claimed in the 1892 Run into Cheyenne Arapaho land. His family worked a marginal sandy farm in a neighborhood of hard-up blacks and whites. He worked as a farmhand, a handyman, a gas station attendant, an oil field flunkey, a carpenter and a preacher. After two years in the Army and three years teaching in public schools he earned a PhD in English from the University of Oklahoma. He taught literature and writing at colleges and universities in Oklahoma and South Dakota before stints as a newspaper journalist, as managing editor of South Dakota Magazine and as a county commissioner.”