Honors:
Borrowed Children - Golden Kite Award
Basket - Kentucky Bluegrass Award
Mountain - Andrew Mountain Press Award
Catalpa - Book of the Year, Appalachian Writers Association
Come a Tide - Reading Rainbow feature
Who Came Down That Road? - Best Books of the Year, Publisher's Weekly
With a Hammer for My Heart - "Original Voices" Series, Borders Bookstore
Praise:
On Lyon's poetry:
"Lyon is never trivial; she writes of things that matter--birth, death,
family, community...her metaphors are always vivid and fresh, and often
brilliant...Lyon's poems are visions to which art has given voice."
---Jim Wayne Miller
On Catalpa:
"Catalpa will read you the riddle of family, of memory, of Oaksie Caudill
and Virginia Woolf, of Red Bird Mission and the Air Force Museum, of searching
"way up the chromosome chain" for your mothers and fathers...Like leaves
on a tree, these gentle, accurate poems will delight eye and ear; like
leaves on a tree, they are both seeming-simple and intricately veined,
each one individual yet part of a whispering, mantic whole."
---Jane Wilson
Joyce
"George Ella Lyon's poems offer many gifts, but a focus on the search
for ancestry seems to me the unique gift of Catalpa. This searching begins
locally and reaches beyond the bonds that unite us all, Appalachian and
non-Appalachian, man and woman, to the essence of our common humanity.
Here we discover lives brought forth in words, "no waste and no hurry...tough
as a poem for the burden that outlasts us, for a heart leaved with words
like a tree."
---Jeff
Daniel Marion
On Borrowed Children:
"A choice coming-of-age story, whose telling is subtle and whose writing
is vivid."
---Booklist,
starred review
"Lyon's simple yet penetrating observations on families and love convey
truths as pertinent to adults as to youthful readers."
---Publishers
Weekly
On Counting on the Woods:
"A book organized around a counting theme features crisp, close-up
photography - in colors so vivid, they hardly seem real - to celebrate
the beauty of the forest in Kentucky...this succeeds in all its riveting
detail as a tribute to a place that both the author and photographer hold
dear."
---Kirkus