POTSDAM -- After more than a year of fundraising and editorial work, a new anthology paying artistic tribute to Maurice Kenny, one of the North Country’s most celebrated authors, has been published by Many Moons Press of Potsdam.

Edited by Derek C. Maus and Donald J. McNutt, two of Kenny’s former colleagues at SUNY Potsdam, Wild Daisies by the Side of the Road: A Collective Tribute to Maurice Kenny not only includes 27 of Kenney’s previously unpublished poems, essays, and sketches, but also features dozens more written and visual tributes by individuals who knew him in person and others who knew him only through his writing.

The book’s contributors include several of Kenny’s colleagues and students from the various North Country colleges at which he worked (SUNY Potsdam, North Country Community College, Paul Smith’s), friends and collaborators from throughout North America, and artists hailing from Austria, Canada, France, Hungary, Russia, and Switzerland.

Maurice Kenny was born in Watertown on August 16, 1929 and died in Saranac Lake on April 16, 2016. Over the course of a career that spanned more than six decades, he worked as a poet, a teacher, a mentor, and an activist, a career that that took him to Brooklyn, Mexico, Chicago, the Virgin Islands, Oklahoma, and British Columbia before he returned to the North Country in the mid-1990s.

He published more than 30 books, was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, received the American Book Award, was awarded an honorary doctorate by St. Lawrence University, and is enshrined in the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

The first edition of this anthology consists of a limited run of 250 paperback copies, printed on acid-free paper with 14 full-color illustrations.

Thanks to the generosity of a substantial number of donors who contributed to an online fundraising drive to offset the initial cost of producing the book, all of the proceeds generated by the sale of this first edition and any subsequent reprint editions will be dedicated to create a scholarship fund for Mohawk students attending SUNY Potsdam.

SUNY Potsdam's College Store carriues the book. Information about how to purchase copies of this book elsewhere is available online at wildroadsidedaisies.wordpress.com or by e-mailing Derek C. Maus at derekmaus@gmail.com.