Winged words

Winged words

Parents and children catching flights at the Kenai Municipal Airport now have the chance to make waiting time into story time. On Friday afternoon the Kenai airport opened a room for families featuring a shelf of donated children’s and young adult books.

Though the airport’s ticket counter area previously had children’s activity tables, the new room — a long-vacant terminal lease once occupied by a travel agent’s office — is the first space the Kenai airport has dedicated to the use and entertainment of traveling families, said Kenai Muncipal Airport administrative assistant Erica Shinn.

The idea for the bookshelf came from Anchorage travel writer Erin Kirkland, who in 2016 brought her family’s collection of used children’s books to a shelf in Anchorage’s Ted Stevens International Airport and started “Read on the Fly,” an effort to distribute donated children’s books in Alaskan airports. Kirkland, who recorded her own family travel experiences in her book “Alaska on the Go: Exploring the 49th State with Children,” said there are now fourteen Read on the Fly book shelfs in seven airports, including Anchorage, Fairbanks, Valdez, Bethel, Ketchikan, and Juneau.

A Soldotna High School shop class built the new shelf in the Kenai airport, and a group of local volunteers led by Shinn will keep it maintained and stocked. Shinn said those wanting to donate books can bring them to her office in the Kenai airport, where she’ll check them for appropriate content and approve them with a sticker on the spine before placing them on the shelf.

The books presently on the shelf come from the Kenai Community Library’s discarded stock and from the collection of donated books that the Friends of the Kenai library keeps for its fundraising book sales. If the program works as intended, though, they won’t stay on the shelf long. Kirkland said Read on the Fly isn’t a lending library — the point is that children passing through the airport will be able to fly away with the books that strike their fancy, without the need to return them.

“We have a lot of expectations of ‘take a book, leave a book,’ or ‘borrow and return,’ but this is about giving books to kids,” Kirkland said.

More in News

A map of the Johnson Tract Mine exploration project. Photo courtesy of the Center for Biological Diversity
Inletkeeper, partners file lawsuit against Cook Inlet gold mine

The Johnson Tract Mine is located on CIRI-owned lands inside Lake Clark National Park.

A sockeye salmon is carried from the waters of Cook Inlet on North Kenai Beach in Kenai, Alaska, during the first day of the Kenai River personal use dipnet fishery on Thursday, July 10, 2025. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)
Kenai River dipnet fishery open 24 hours beginning Friday night

Per fish counts available from the department, 471,000 sockeye have been counted so far this year — with 108,000 counted on Wednesday alone.

Attorneys Eric Derleth and Dan Strigle speak to Superior Court Judge Kelly Lawson during the opening arguments of State of Alaska v. Nathan Erfurth at the Kenai Courthouse in Kenai, Alaska, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)
Opening arguments offered in Erfurth trial

The trial is set to continue for around two weeks, into early August.

Evacuees in Seward, Alaska, walk along Adams Street following a tsunami warning on Wednesday, July 16, 2025. (Photo by Jeff Helminiak/Peninsula Clarion)
Tsunami warning canceled following 7.3 earthquake near Sand Point

An all clear was issued for Kachemak Bay communities at 1:48 p.m. by the Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management.

The Ninilchik River on May 18, 2019, in Ninilchik, Alaska. (Photo by Michael Armstrong/Homer News)
Ninilchik River to remain closed to king salmon fishing

It was an “error in regulation” that would have opened the Ninilchik River to king salmon fishing on Wednesday.

A table used by parties to a case sits empty in Courtroom 4 of the Kenai Courthouse in Kenai, Alaska, on Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2024. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)
Nikiski woman sentenced to 4 years in prison for 2023 drug death

Lawana Barker was sentenced for her role in the 2023 death of Michael Rodgers.

Alaska State Troopers logo.
Seward resident arrested after Monday night police pursuit

Troopers say she led them on a high-speed chase on Kalifornsky Beach Road for around 7 miles.

Concert-goers listen to The Discopians at Concert on the Lawn on Saturday, July 12, 2025, at Karen Hornaday Park in Homer, Alaska. (Delcenia Cosman/Homer News)
‘Dancing at the end of the world’

KBBI AM 890 hosted their annual Concert on the Lawn Saturday.

Most Read