Kansas City-area writers have won this year’s William Rockhill Nelson Awards. The awards are given by the city’s Writers Place and the Kansas City Star. Here’s the news from the Star, www.kansascity.com/entertainment/story/759984.html:

Matthew Eck, Diane Glancy and Milton S. Katz are the winners of the sixth annual William Rockhill Nelson Awards honoring literary excellence by Kansas and Missouri writers.

The Farther Shore, Eck’s debut novel, took the fiction prize. Glancy won the poetry award for Asylum in the Grasslands, and Katz was named the nonfiction winner for Breaking Through: John B. McLendon, Basketball Legend and Civil Rights Pioneer.

Other finalists in the fiction category were R.M. Kinder for An Absolute Gentleman and Morley Swingle for Bootheel Man. Walter Bargen’s West of West and John Gallaher’s The Little Book of Guesses were poetry finalists, and Michael L. Johnson’s Hunger for the Wild and R. Alton Lee’s From Snake Oil to Medicine were nominated in the nonfiction category.

Judges for the 2008 awards: Lan Samantha Chang chose the fiction winner, Ted Kooser judged the poetry category, and Jeff Guinn selected the top nonfiction book.

The awards are sponsored by the Writers Place and The Kansas City Star with support from The Star’s VIP Committee.

The awards will be presented to the winners in a ceremony this fall; details on that ceremony still are being finalized.

The Writers Place and The Star created the William Rockhill Nelson Awards to recognize the literary achievements of authors living in Kansas and Missouri and named the awards after the newspaper’s founder, who not only shaped the future of the city’s major daily newspaper but also influenced Kansas City’s civic development in numerous ways.