The Glen Arbor Sun was named local news media publication of the year and won 18 awards in 11 different categories from the Michigan Press Association’s 2025 Better Newspaper Contest for stories published between August 1, 2024, and July 31, 2025. The awards were unveiled on Thursday, April 23, at MPA conference at the Kellogg Center in East Lansing.
“If art heightens our awareness or makes us more conscious of the victims of wrongdoing, then maybe we move the needle,” as writer Anne-Marie Oomen said, “one iota of one iota.” The artistic collaboration between award-winning photographer Taro Yamasaki and writer Anne-Marie Oomen—both Leelanau County residents—strives to do just that. Their exhibit, titled Innocents in Peril, is now displayed in the Erie room at the State Library of Michigan in Lansing. The exhibit consists of 22 of Yamasaki’s award-winning photographs and oral histories paired with 19 of Oomen’s poems, inspired by the photographs. The exhibit features Yamasaki’s photographs of children surviving conditions of war or living under oppressive regimes. Yamasaki’s photographs of innocents ravaged by war, disease, natural disasters, and the cruelty of tyrants, will also be featured on May 13 at the Dennos Museum’s Milliken Auditorium at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City. The free event, which commemorates achievements by Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, is titled “Speaking truth to power,” and runs from 5-8 pm.
Frank Siepker, Jr., has launched his floating Christmas tree on Big Glen Lake for the fifth year in a row. The tree’s lights are solar powered. Photo by Taro Yamasaki
This Labor Day, let’s pause during our grill parties and beach picnics and remember the workers. Here, Jim Peterson of Empire and Betty Schaub of Maple City package dark chocolate-covered dried cherries at the Cherry Republic warehouse in Empire.
Attacks on immigration make headlines nationwide, but here in Leelanau County our farmers enjoy a healthy, symbiotic relationship with their migrant laborers—without whom the cherries would not be picked this summer.
Peter Richards had an unassuming Leelanau County life, growing up in Suttons Bay, and graduating from Glen Lake High School in 2004. And then it hit: photography entered his life as he entered Northern Michigan University that fall.
Meeting Taro Yamasaki for the first time, one would never guess that this soft-spoken, bespectacled man with a bit of gray in his beard wasn’t a typical Up North transplant with his slice of heaven amongst Leelanau’s trees, beaches and lake scenes. Then he begins to talk about his life’s work as a photojournalist, whose strong, often beautiful pictures paradoxically convey searing images that indict those who not only perpetrate violence upon their fellow beings, but also those of us who stand by, silent or indifferent or ignorant.