A Colorado Authors League finalist in the 2024 Middle Grade Book Awards, Hawk’s Cry is a historical fiction novel, interweaving two time periods, two stories, and two protagonists, each sent on a perilous quest. Ryan thinks he is imagining the boy standing before him. When he reaches out to touch the Cheyenne, laying the palm of his hand on the boy’s chest, he feels the strong thump of a heartbeat. With this mystical encounter, twelve-year-old Ryan Tyler is sent on an impossible quest to return a rare artifact, part of a plains courting flute, to the wilderness of the Cheyenne boy’s youth. Ryan experiences Cheyenne rituals and faces trials that make him question his quest into the rugged, untamed, and unforgiving Wyoming mountains. A century and a half earlier, Little Hawk wants only two things, to live the life of Cheyenne and to become a Cheyenne warrior. But his world is turned upside down when his father decides to join a group of renegade warriors wreaking havoc across the plains. Not only is Little Hawk separated from his beloved grandfather, the man who helped him make his plain’s courting flute, but he is forced to delay his vision quest and warrior ceremony. However, traveling through the sacred Medicine Bow mountain range known for its powerful medicine , Little Hawk experiences a frightful vision. Now, he alone must come to terms with his dangerous future. *** Often overlooked, the battle at Summit Springs, or White Butte Creek as referred to by the Cheyenne, was the last battle fought on the prairie of Colorado. Following this fight, the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux tribes were relegated to reservations. They no longer roamed the Colorado plains during the summer to hunt buffalo in preparation for the cold, winter months. The life of the Plains Indian in Colorado changed forever. Though Hawk’s Cry is a work of fiction, Little Hawk was a real Cheyenne boy at the battle of Summit Springs and is credited with saving many women and children on July 11, 1869. "Hawk's Cry, The Story of a Cheyenne Hero , is a gripping and sensitive tale of two boys, one White and one Indigenous. The boys share a landscape and separate coming-of-age moments, one in the present and the other in 1869 during the Battle of Summit Springs. Cheyenne people lost much in 1860s Colorado, and this book gives voice to some of that loss." -Anne Hyde is a Professor of History and Editor-in-Chief of the "Western Quarterly". Her most recent book is Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West . Her earlier work, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860 (2012) won Columbia University's Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. "I found Hawk's Cry, The Story of a Cheyenne Hero to be one of the most compelling and richly-written stories for young people that I have ever read." -Laurie Wagner Buyers Jameson was an award winning poet, memoirist, & novelist. Her books include Side Canyons , Open Range: Poetry of the Re-Imagined West , and Across the High Divide , winner of the 2007 Spur Award for Best Poetry. "Hawk's Cry, The Story of a Cheyenne Hero is the story of two boys. One, Ryan, is 12 and living in present day Colorado; the other, a fifteen-year-old Cheyenne, Little Hawk, who lived 150 years in the past. He dies at the Battle of Summit Springs, killed alongside many warriors by the US Calvary. Ryan lives near the site and often looks for evidence from the massacre. One day he finds a piece of Little Hawk's flute. When Little Hawk comes to him in a vision, Ryan makes it his mission to get the piece of flute back to where it belongs.Koester weaves the journeys of the two boys together in a mystical story, one yearning to join his grandfather in the spirit world, and the other who feels the urgency to help this Cheyenne young man find his way home. The history of Summit Springs and the Cheyenne struggle to maintain their lives as settlers invade their land is carefully placed within the story. The reader gains an understanding and appreciation of the struggle Native Americans faced in the late 1800s. Hawk's Cry is a wonderful text for social studies and history classes grades 6-9th, or as a choice book in English classes for students interested in history and who love a good story." -Karen Hartman is a retired high school English and reading teacher, director of the Colorado Writing Project, and a Young Adult Lit. expert and speaker. She has been a lover of YAL for almost 50 years, often giving book talks on what's new in Young Adult Literature at Colorado educational conferences. Luann Atkin Koester writes historical fiction for teens, young adults, and adults who simply enjoy a good story, even when the protagonist is a youngster. She is the author of a children's book, Gran Kissed the Blarney Stone , and a lover and writer of poetry. Recently retired after over twenty-six years of teaching English Language Ar