In the News:
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Mark Sanders has a new book out, a collection of his poetry from the past 30 years ....

Mark Sanders’ Conditions of Grace: New and Selected Poems brings together the best work from a thirty-year career. These selections include powerful lyrics and narratives, metaphorical and fearless observations of the landscapes of region and heart, and a music that is at both subtle and alluring.

"Mark Sanders writes, he says, in “plain speech for a plain people.” But the complexities of his social and familial involvements, his awareness of self and others, mean that the lives rendered here are anything but plain. They are ornery, funny, bedeviled, passionate, private, and performative—I mean, the people and Sanders’ poems. This poet is of the same important tribe as Ted Kooser and Jo McDougall, Dave Etter and Jim Barnes, in tune with a type of Midwestern and democratic rhetoric—'plain' but dramatic, public but precise."—David Baker, editor of Kenyon Review

"Mark Sanders is a keen observer, a careful translator of experience and an archivist of the actual. He can 'turn sharp on a country thought' or channel Wallace Stevens, and his Conditions of Grace displays and utters a vital world of hawks, horses and humane humans either wrestling with sorrow or 'downing shots of Comfort.' His poems are deft and significant, and I’m betting most readers who find their way to this book will not be eager to find their way out. Instead, they’ll want to join Sanders as, 'We stand our furious ground.'"—R. T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah.

About the Author
Mark Sanders is a Plains native—born, raised, and educated in Nebraska. His poems, stories, and creative essays have appeared in publications in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and Canada, including Glimmer Train, Puerto Del Sol, Dalhousie Review, Prairie Schooner, Western American Literature, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, and numerous others. Since 1977, he has authored a dozen or so chapbooks of poetry and prose, a collection of short fiction, and three collections of poetry. He has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and received a notable mention in the 2009Pushcart Anthology for a essay that appeared in Shenandoah; he also received acknowledgment as having written one of the 100 outstanding stories in 2007 in Best American Short Stories, edited by Stephen King. Also in 2007, he received the Mildred Bennett Award from the Nebraska Center for the Book for fostering Nebraska’s literary heritage. He has taught in colleges and universities in Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Idaho.
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a new anthology from U of Arizona Press :

SING: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas

Editor and poet Allison Hedge Coke assembles this multilingual collection of Indigenous American poetry, joining voices old and new in songs of witness and reclamation. Unprecedented in scope, Sing
gathers more than eighty poets from across the Americas, covering territory that stretches from Alaska to Chile, and features familiar names like Sherwin Bitsui, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Lee Maracle, and Simon Ortiz alongside international poets—both emerging and acclaimed—from regions underrepresented in anthologies.

They write from disparate zones and parallel experience, from lands of mounded earthwork long-since paved, from lands of ancient ball courts and the first great cities on the continents, from places of cold, from places of volcanic loam, from zones of erased history and ongoing armed conflict, where “postcolonial” is not an academic concept but a lived reality. As befits a volume of such geographical inclusivity, many poems here appear in multiple languages, translated by fellow poets and writers like Juan Felipe Herrera and Cristina Eisenberg.

Hedge Coke’s thematic organization of the poems gives them an added resonance and continuity, and readers will appreciate the story of the genesis of this project related in Hedge Coke’s deeply felt introduction, which details her experiences as an invited performer at several international poetry festivals. Sing is a journey compelled by the exploration of kinship and the desire for songs that open “pathways of return.”
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" Many of the poems in this ambitious collection remind us why we read poetry at all—to be returned to the elemental, to relish the beauty of repetition and variation, and to hear the cries of singular voices, here marginalized because of their native culture but also because of the daring announcement of their individuality "

—Billy Collins
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Available at Amazon Books , Book Ends (Kearney), and other fine stores

see more at University of Arizona webpage: http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid2299.htm

the UN- Kearney Reynolds Reading Series can be found at:
http://www.unk.edu/academics/english/UNK_Reynolds_Series/

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The Book of What Stays
James Crews
University of Nebraska Press

the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

For any of us, what stays? For the arsonist’s wife who has not yet left? The devout saint trudging another mile in his nail-shoes? The lost couple in their dying moments in a Nebraska blizzard? The old woman who refuses to leave her home in Chernobyl? With an unflinching eye, James Crews gives us the forbidden love, forbidden unions, and secret lives that, whatever the loss, the attrition, the cost, we must acknowledge, must hold, must keep. And here, in Crews’s finely wrought, deeply felt poems, is their testimony.

James Crews was the 2009 recipient of the Prairie Schooner Bernice Slote Award for Emerging Writers. He is the author of What Has Not Yet Left, winner of the 2009 Copperdome Prize; One Hundred Small Yellow Envelopes; andBending the Knot, winner of the 2008 Gertrude Press Chapbook Prize. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

"This is a marvelous book: a debut collection filled with the voice of an old soul, someone who has battled to claim what he knows. James Crews’ compassionate intelligence ranges wide, looking for stories within the stories of news accounts, saints, and mythological figures, sifting through experience and possibility to find moments of intense clarity and feeling."—Teresa Scollon,ForeWord

"The Book of What Stays is one of the very best original books of poetry I've read in the past couple of years . . . . I feel that while this book may be the one that stays, there's a "part two" quickly on the way."—Michael Simms, Coal Hill Review


“Crews’s aptly titled debut collection has staying power galore. In his lyrical, pitch-perfect renditions of regret and loss, this poet bears exacting witness to the parallel world of acceptance and renewal animated everywhere by the dizzying physics of human grace under pressure. In describing a homeless woman’s cart brimming with empty cans and copper wiring—the ‘shining and weighty cargo / of grief she’s headed to redeem’—Crews shows us where he’sgoing, too. And when he elsewhere promises ‘a fast river you can follow to its source / if you believe the motto here has always been Forward,’ the poet’s hard-won optimism is nothing less than a revitalizing tonic. When all is said, if not quite done, what stays with the reader are these bracing poems: sustenance for the undeniably long haul.”—David Clewell, author of Taken Somehow by Surprise


“In the ‘sweet language of what burns,’ James Crews explores a realm of love and loss—through images of hyacinths, lice, and loam, and through the secret lives of saints and gods, lovers, husbands, and poets. These poignant poems call us to the hope of our ‘breathing together.’”

—Minnie Bruce Pratt, author of The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems

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more info on U of NE Press Books:
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/catalog/CategoryInfo.aspx?cid=152
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Bohemian Girl
Terese Svoboda
University of Nebraska Press

Flyover Fiction Series

Young Harriet’s father sells her as a slave to settle his gambling debt with an eccentric Indian—and her story is just beginning. Part Huck Finn, part True Grit, Harriet’s story of her encounter with the dark and brutal history of the American West is a true original. When she escapes the strange mound-building obsession of her Pawnee captor, Harriet sets off on a trek to find her father, only to meet with ever-stranger characters and situations along the way. She befriends a Jewish prairie peddler, escapes with a chanteuse, is imprisoned in a stockade and rescued by a Civil War balloonist, and becomes an accidental shopkeeper and the surrogate mother to an abandoned child, while abetting the escape of runaway slaves.

A picaresque in the American vein, Terese Svoboda’s new novel is the Bohemian answer to Willa Cather’s iconic My Ántonia. Lifting the shadows off an entire era of American history in one brave girl’s quest to discover who she is,Bohemian Girl gives full play to Svoboda’s prodigious talents for finding the dark and the strange in the sunny American story—and the beauty and the hope in its darkest moments.


Terese Svoboda is the author of five volumes of poetry and four novels, includingTin God (Nebraska 2006); a collection of short stories, Trailer Girl and Other Stories (available in a Bison Books edition); and a nonfiction book, Black Glasses like Clark Kent: A GI’s Secret from Postwar Japan, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize.


"Harriet's observations of the world and her small place in it are insightful and often touching. And Svoboda (Trailer Girl and Other Stories) often displays a poet's touch with language and imagery."—Publishers Weekly


"Creating a western world as raucous and unpredictable as any imagined by Larry McMurtry, and teeming with characters as tragically heroic as those created by Willa Cather, Svoboda offers a vividly distinctive tale of the American frontier."—Carol Haggas, Booklist starred review


"Hollywood has handed us an American West of cowboys, cattle, train whistles, and Indian wars, but Terese Svoboda offers a different glimpse of history, from the perspective of a young girl abandoned by her own father to make her way in a world that has mostly cruelty to offer. . . . An eloquent exploration of the Wild West from the perspective of one of its victims who refuses to be victimized."—Andi Diehn, ForeWord


"Billed as "part Huck Finn, part True Grit," with Willa Cather mentioned as well, this in fact is sure to have a narrative voice all its own, and one worth waiting for."—Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal


"We never doubt Harriet will seize as much satisfaction as this hard life can spare. . . . A marvelous heroine with an iron will and a unique voice."—Kirkus


"Terese Svoboda's unusual, yet wonderful narrative reaches its apex of richness and character development as the book draws to an ending as unpredictable as the book itself. . . . Readers who appreciate writing that is innovative, follows no rules, and is equally exasperating and enchanting will fully enjoy Bohemian Girl."—Micki Peluso, New York Journal of Books

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Destroy All Monsters, and other stories
Greg Hrbek
University of Nebraska Press

the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Greg Hrbek’s Destroy All Monsters, and Other Stories is a collection that explores what it means to be human—and inhuman. These ten stories have won an array of honors—and whether set in the historical past or in a speculative future, each is wildly imaginative and shockingly real.


In “Sagittarius,” selected for The Best American Short Stories, a mother and father search a dark forest for their missing newborn, who is either a child with profound birth defects or a miraculous creature. In “False Positive,” a ghostly girl visits her biological father ten years after being aborted in utero. In “Bereavement,” a marriage is falling apart following a child’s accidental death, but a combination of myth and technology provides hope for a second life. Fantastic, horrific, painfully familiar, these stories are the work of a consummate storyteller.



Greg Hrbek is the author of The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly, which won the James Jones First Novel Award. His short stories have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Conjunctions, and Black Warrior Review and have been short-listed for the O. Henry Prize and the Bridport Prize. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.



"Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Hrbek's first collection subtly and masterfully merges the everyday and the mythic, poetic, futuristic, and seemingly impossible."—Jonathan Fullmer, Booklist


"Mr. Hrbek's writing is often lovely and sparse—almost poetic."—Michael Adelberg, New York Journal of Books


“Each story in this spellbinding collection hovers on the threshold of the impossible, the place where our most basic fears and desires as mothers and fathers and children get turned into something so new and startling the sight of it can change you forever. These are dark stories, but at the heart of their darkness there is perfect, irresistible radiance.” —Kathryn Davis, author of The Thin Place


“These are unsettling but strangely moving stories written under the sign of Terror—about freaks of nature (centaurs, mermaids), about the terror of war (Hiroshima, a dystopian disaster of the future), about subteen suicides, about the invasion of Saipan, about an eleven-year-old criminal on death row. . . . Hrbek is a gifted narrator who moves with stealth and swiftness toward his violent fictional goals. He belongs in the same league as Judy Budnitz and Gary Shteyngart—young visionaries who have seen the future and know its hell.”—Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story

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June 21st: Back in the Animal Kingdom, poems by Neil Harrison, is now available from Pinyon Publishing - Neil writes from home base in the Norfolk, NE, area
June 20th - Amy Plettner now has copies of her new collection of poetry, Undoing Orion's Belt, available - this is the 7th in the Kloefkorn Series, from WSC PRESS
1/31: Sarah McKinstry-Brown's 1st full-length collection, Cradling Monsoons, is out! Available atAmazon.com and others.
1/31: Paul Dickey's book, They Say This Is How Death Came into the World is fresh out from May Apple Press
1/31: a special issue of The Midwest Quarterlydedicated to Nebraska poetry is accepting submissions. Send up to 5 poems and a brief bio by email attachment to smeats@pittstate.edu or by regular mail. The deadline is March 15.
The Nebraska Center for the Book’s
2010 Nebraska Book Awards :


Fiction: Ladette Randolph, “A Sandhills Ballad,” University of New Mexico Press.


Nonfiction: Joe Starita, “‘I Am a Man’: Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice,” St. Martin’s Press.


Nonfiction Honor: Robert Cochran, “Louise Pound: Scholar, Athlete, Feminist Pioneer,” University of Nebraska Press.


Anthology: Bruce A. Glasrud and Charles A. Braithwaite, “African Americans on the Great Plains: An Anthology,” University of Nebraska Press.


Anthology Honor: Loren C. Eiseley, Ray Bradbury and Aaron Franco, “The Loren Eiseley Reader,” Abbatia Press/Infusionmedia Publishing.


Young Adult: Chloe Neill, “Some Girls Bite,” New American Library.


Poetry: Dwaine Spieker, “Garden of Stars,” All Along Press.


Cover/Design/Illustration: Mari Sandoz and Kimberli A. Lee, “‘I Do Not Apologize for the Length of This Letter’: The Mari Sandoz Letters on Native American Rights, 1940-1965,” Texas Tech University Press; Lindsay Starr, designer; cover photos courtesy of the Caroline Sandoz Pifer Collection, Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center at Chadron State College.


Cover/Design/Illustration Honor: Michael Forsberg, “Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild,” University of Chicago Press.


The 2010 Jane Geske Award will be presented to Plainsongs poetry magazine, which was started in 1980 at Peru State College and since 1983 has been published by Hastings College. The current editor is Laura Marvel Wunderlich.
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Amy Plettner has a poetry book coming out Spring, 2011, from WSC Press


Marge Saiser has a new book of Poetry, " Beside You at the Stoplight" (Backwaters Press, Oct. 2010)


Nebraska writer Fred Zydek has new material!!


Winthrop Press is pleased to announce two new books by Fredrick Zydek.T'Kopachuck: The Buckley Poems are spun from early life experiences living in the mountain community of Buckley, Washington. It contains some of Mr. Zydek's award winning poems.
Charles Taze Russell: The Man, The Message and The Millennium is the culmination of 35 years of research and five years of writing. It is the first biography of Russell to appear in almost one hundred years.


http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Fredrick+Zydek&ih=13_0_0_0_1_0_0_0_0_1.96_265&fsc=-1&x=17&y=20


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Black Star Press
has extended the deadline for submitting poems for the 2011 Poetry Calendar!!


Black Star Press is seeking poems for a calendar featuring Nebraska poets. All poems must
somehow relate to a month or season in Nebraska, must be written by a Nebraska poet, and must be no more than 30 lines. The poems need not be "seasonal poems" but must dance somehow with the images and experiences of living in Nebraska.
One poem will be selected for each month; its author will be the featured poet for that month Each featured poem will be complemented by artwork by a Nebraska artist. Biographic and
bibliographic information about the featured poets will also be included.
Our goal is to reflect the character of Nebraska and the ability of its poets. Previously published
material will be considered along with unpublished poetry, as long as the poet retains the copyright.


Please send no more than six poems to:
Sarah Fairchild, Editor
Black Star Press
2236 A Street
Lincoln, NE 68502


Extended Deadline: July 15, 2010
please check: http://sites.google.com/site/blackstarpress


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the old JONES Coffee, also know as D'Beans, has REOPENed


as Cultiva Cafe'


- 727 S. 11th sts, Lincoln -- mighty burritos and other munchies, plus live music many nites a week!
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SEE PICS of recent writers' & Musicians' events, at the right>
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Come back here to see Lincoln area events,
or visit Matt Mason's regional reading site,
Poetry Menu athttp://www.poetrymenu.com/
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for more in-depth writer info for Nebraska,
see Brent Spencer's Nebraska Center for Writers, athttp://mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/index.htm


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THE UNTIDY SEASON -- AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEBRASKA WOMEN POETS:


The Backwaters Press is now accepting submissions for The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poetsthrough December 31st of 2010, for expected publication in Spring of 2012. Contributors must be Nebraskan women, which includes all women born or currently residing in Nebraska. Poets who have previously lived in Nebraska for a period of not less than 10 years, will also be considered. We ask that all submissions include a brief statement describing the author’s connection to the state of Nebraska. Poetry submissions need not specifically address Nebraska issues or geography, though both are certainly welcome.
email:theuntidyseason@yahoo.com


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Check in periodically at this site to see updates for the University of Nebraska-Kearney's Reynolds Chair Readings & Events:http://www.unk.edu/fah/english.aspx?id=39530


or, email Prof. Allison Hedge-Coke: hedgecokeaa@unk.edu


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Lincoln's CLAWFOOT HOUSEbringing on the songwriters, musicians, poetry, and support for artists of all stripes!! see
Clawfoot House
athttp://www.clawfoothouse.com/




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Don Welch, poet emeritus from Kearney, has a new chapbook out soon! EntitledTravels , this will be available in early 2010 -- you may inquire at Finishing Line Presshttp://www.finishinglinepress.com/


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J. V. Brummels has a new book out now: City at War (BackWaters Press) Order through
Amazon, or B&N , and see more athttp://thebackwaterspress.com/


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Peru State College teacher Tammy Trucks-Bordeaux's book Brought Back Safely will be released by Pudding House Publications in 2010.


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WriteLife Announces "Facing the Blank Page,"
a Must-Read Compilation of Essays and Papers
OMAHA, NE-- - WriteLife, LLC, a unique collaborativepublishing company for fiction and non-fiction authors, announces "Facing the Blank Page," a collection of poems and essays written over the past ten years by David Martin, managing editor of Fine Lines. The book is available on the site atwww.writelife.com and major online retailers such as Target, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.
"Facing the Blank Page" is a compilation of a decade's worth of essays and poems penned to provide sage advice, motivational tips and reflections on the craft of writing. David Martin was the creative spark behind a high school classroom newsletter that began in 1991 and developed into a quarterly publication called Fine Lines. Martin, managing editor of the publication, penned the opening segment for the first four-page publication and continued to do so for every issue since.
"It is an honor to be able to publish 'Facing the Blank Page.' My personal motivation has always been to invigorate otherauthors, to spread ideas and develop the power of the written word," stated author David Martin. "WriteLifeprovided me with the opportunity to compile and publish the first ten years of essays and papers from Fine Lines. To be a writer you simply have to have something to say and have a passion for how it is said. It is an honor to continue to touch authors of all ages through Fine Lines and for this compilation to be available to the public at large."


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Garden of Stars, a new poetry collection by Dwayne Spieker will be available from All Along Press in spring, 2010http://www.allalongpress.com/
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Read the Journal-Star story on Terrance Oberst, poet/teacher, member of the Writers Workshop group reading at Tuesdays with Writers on March 2nd:
http://www.journalstar.com/news/local/article_de45a988-2418-11df-98d0-001cc4c03286.html


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Check the link below for the full details on Jim Reese' newest poetry collection, GHOST ON 3rd :
http://www.nyqbooks.org/title/ghoston3rd


Jim is an old friend of Nebraska writers, now teaching at Mt. Marty College in Yankton, SD, and spearheading SPEARFISH magazine there --
Rex Walton