National Poetry Month & Creative Writing Events - 2019

April 1-25, 2019

Sponsored by the Department of English and its Creative Writing Program

Literary events throughout the month! Meet other student writers, hear award-winning authors discuss their work, and learn more about poetry and creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. All events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.

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Panel Discussion: Influence and Inspiration

Monday, April 1, 2019 at 1:30 p.m. - Andrews Hall Bailey Library

Panelists Kwame Dawes, Grace Bauer, David Winter, and Timothy Schaffert discuss drawing creative inspiration from historical research and classic works of art, theater, and film. Explore the role of research in creating new work, as well as the influence of art, literature, theater, and film. How do writers draw from the past, and from other representations of it? How do they take historical moments and examine their cultural relevancy today?

Poetry by graduate and undergraduate students

Tuesday, April 2, 2019 at 4:30 p.m. - Sheldon Museum of Art

Poetry reading with graduate and undergraduate students in the UNL English creative writing program, with an emphasis on historical research and visual art.

The Reading Series presents Natasha Trethewey

Thursday, April 4, 2019 at 7:00 p.m. - Sheldon Museum of Art

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000) which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi and and in 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Memoir: Karen Babine, UNL English alumna

Tuesday, April 9, 2019 at 7:00 p.m. - Andrews Hall Bailey Library

Karen Babine is the author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer (Milkweed Editions) and the award-winning Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life (University of Minnesota Press), winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for memoir/creative nonfiction, finalist for the Midwest Book Award and the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award. Her work has appeared in such journals as Brevity, River Teeth, North American Review, Slag Glass City, Sweet, and her essays have twice been named Notables in Best American Essays. She also edits Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She lives in Minneapolis.

Poetry: Lisa Fay Coutley

Thursday, April 11, 2019 at 5:00 p.m. - Andrews Hall Bailey Library

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of tether, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2020, Errata (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), which was selected by Adrienne Su as a winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and was named a finalist for the Society of Midland Authors’ Best Book of 2015 and for Foreword Review’s 2015 Book of the Year awards, In the Carnival of Breathing (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, and Back-Talk, winner of the Rooms Chapbook Contest (2010). She is the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rona Jaffe Scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, chosen by Dana Levin. Her poetry and prose have been anthologized in Best New PoetsBest of the Net, Best of Kore PressThe Way NorthHere: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper PeninsulaDouble Kiss: Contemporary Writers on the Art of Billiards, and on Verse DailyBest American Essays 2016 named her lyric essay “Why to Run Racks” a Notable Essay of 2015. Her most recent & forthcoming prose and poetry publications include 32 Poems, AGNI, Blackbird, Brevity, The Los Angeles Review, Narrative, Passages North, Pleiades, and The Cincinnati Review. 

Poetry: Sara Henning

Tuesday, April 16, 2019 at 5:00 p.m. - Andrews Hall Bailey Library

Sara Henning is the author of two volumes of poetry, most recently View from True North, which won the 2017 Crab Orchard Poetry Open Prize and will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in fall 2018. Her other collections include A Sweeter Water (2013), as well as two chapbooks, Garden Effigies (dancing girl press, 2015) and To Speak of Dahlias (Finishing Line Press, 2012). In 2015, she won the Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, judged by Alberto Ríos. She has published poems in several journals and anthologies, most notably Quarterly West, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, Passages North, RHINO, Meridian, and the Cincinnati Review. She also has a record of publication in fiction and nonfiction, with flash fiction and lyric essays published in journals such as Connotation Press, where she appeared as featured author for the September 2016 issue, and 4 PM Count, a journal associated with the Arts Endowment's interagency initiative with Department of Justice's Federal Bureau of Prisons in Yankton, South Dakota. Sara lives in Nacogdoches, TX, where she teaches at Stephen F. Austin State University and serves as poetry editor for Stephen F. Austin State University Press.

Poetry: Jamaica Baldwin, Ángel García, Katie Marya, and Ivan Young, creative writing graduate students

Tuesday, April 23, 2019 at 6:00 p.m. - Indigo Bridge Books

Jamaica Baldwin’s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Hayden’s Ferry, Rattle, Birdfeast, Third Coast Review, Prairie Schooner and TriQuarterly, among others. She currently lives in Lincoln where she is pursuing her Ph.D. in Creative Writing at UNL.

Katie Marya is from both Atlanta, GA and Las Vegas, NV. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in poetry at UNL. Her work can be found in The Rio Review, North American Review, Southern Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner and Five Points.

Ángel García, the proud son of Mexican immigrants, is the author of Teeth Never Sleep, winner of the 2018 CantoMundo Poetry Prize and finalist for the Pen America Open Book Award.

Ivan Young is the author of Smell of Salt, Ghost of Rain, and the 2018 Mayor’s Honoree for the Kimmel Harding Nelson Residency Award. His work has been featured in American Life in Poetry and has won the Editor’s Prize for Apple Valley Review and 1st Runner up for RHINO Magazine’s Founder’s Prize.

No Name Reading

Thursday, April 25, 2019 at 6:30 p.m. - Indigo Bridge Books

The No Name Reading Series features the best in poetry and prose from graduate student writers in the  Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Readings take place several times each semester.