Civil War book writer wins award

Sunday, May 12, 2013

The author of a book about the Civil War in Arkansas is this year’s winner of the Central Arkansas Library System’s literary award.

Mark Christ, author of Civil War Arkansas 1863, will be presented with the 2013 Booker Worthen Literary Prize at a ceremony in October. The date has not been announced.

Christ, who grew up in Fort Wayne, Ind., moved to Little Rock in 1976. His thesis at the University of Oklahoma, where he obtained his master’s degree in 2000, focused on the Little Rock Campaign of 1863.

He noticed there wasn’t a lot of literature about theCivil War in Arkansas and decided to write his nonfiction book, which was published in 2010.

“So that’s how I spent that decade,” he said, jokingly. “I’ve just had an interest in the Civil War since I was a kid and happily ended up in a place that is just surrounded by it, so I was able to makemy avocation my vocation.”

As community outreach director for the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, Christ works on statewide battlefield issues and with groups in the state on preserving their local battlefields.

For his efforts with the preservation program, for which he’s worked 23 years, Christ will receive the State Preservation Leadership Award from the Civil War Trust, the largest nonprofit battlefield preservation group in the nation, at its national conference in June.

Christ’s book is interesting to scholars but also relevant to average readers, said David Stricklin, the head of the Butler Center of Arkansas Studies, a division of the library system.

“People who are history Ph.D’s and folks like that will use his books in their research, but you don’t have to have a Ph.D to be able to read them,” Stricklin said. “So that’s one of the thingsI think is most impressive about Mark. He bridges that gap that often exists between scholars and the lay readership.”

Stricklin said Christ’s book is written about a year in which two famous battles - Gettysburg and Vicksburg - took place outside of the state, but Christ details the war’s progress in Arkansas during that time.

“Mark’s book shows there was a lot of really important stuff going on in Arkansas in 1863,” Stricklin said.

A committee of five people, headed by library system Associate Director Bob Razer, chose Christ as this year’s winner of the Worthen award. The library system hasn’t announced the winner of its Porter Prize,which also will be presented at the October ceremony.

The Worthen Prize is not always given to nonfiction writers or to an author of a book about Arkansas, but is presented only to authors living in central Arkansas. The 2012 winner, David Welky, wrote a book about the Ohio-Mississippi flood of 1937. The year before, the award went to a pair of authors, Phillip H. McMath and Emily Matson Lewis, who based their novel on the life of a Holocaust survivor.

Winners receive a $2,000 stipend along with the award.

“It’s a great honor,” Christ said. “I was pleasantly surprised to hear about it. I’m just kind of flabbergasted.”

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 17 on 05/12/2013