April 16-19, 2008
Embassy Suites Omaha Downtown/Old Market, Omaha, Nebraska

 

Speakers

 

Sean Doolittle

Author

A native Nebraskan, Sean Doolittle is the acclaimed author of The Clean Up (2006), Rain Dogs (2005), Burn (2003), and Dirt (2001). His fiction has been well-received by the nation's literary critics, including Marilyn Stasio with The New York Times Book Review, Dick Adler of The Chicago Tribune, and David Pitt of Booklist. His short stories have been collected in Plots With Guns and The Year's Best Mystery Stories 2002.

 

Walter Echo-Hawk (Pawnee)

Senior Staff Attorney, Native American Rights Fund, Boulder, Colorado

Walter Echo-Hawk received a B.S. in Political Sciences from Oklahoma State University and a J.D. from the University of New Mexico. A Justice on the Pawnee Nation's Supreme Court, Mr. Echo-Hawk is also admitted to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court, Colorado Supreme Court, U.S. Courts Appeals for the 8th, 9th, and 10th Circuits. He is writing a book on the legal statues before and after the Indian Wars.

 

Neil Harrison

Instructor, Northeast Community College, Norfolk, Nebraska

Neil Harrison, who holds an MFA in Writing-Fiction from Vermont College, has published widely in both regional and national journals and magazines. Among his publications are Into the River Canyon at Dusk (2005), Into a River of Wind (2000), and Story (1996). His poetry has appeared in Nebraska Life, Tailwind, Onionhead, The Midwest Quarterly, Writer's Forum, and Nebraska Review, among other places.

 

Alex Kava

Author

Alex Kava enjoys an international reputation as a mystery writer and is a New York Times bestselling author. Her novels include Whitewash, A Necessary Evil, One False Move, and A Perfect Evil, among others. She was the 2006 selected author (with One False Move) for the One Book/One Nebraska statewide reading. Kava, a native of Silver Creek, Nebraska and an alumna of the College of St. Mary in Omaha, has been called "the mistress of maniacal serial killers" and "a master of the psychological thriller."

 

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Author and New York Times Essayist

Verlyn Klinkenborg was born in Colorado in 1952 and raised in Iowa and California. He graduated from Pomona College and received a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University. Mr. Klinkenborg joined the editorial board in 1997. He is the author of Making Hay (1986), The Last Fine Time (1991) and The Rural Life (2003). His work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, National Geographic, The New Republic, Smithsonian, Audubon, GQ, Gourmet, Martha Stewart Living, Sports Afield and The New York Times Magazine. He has taught literature and creative writing at Fordham University, St. Olaf College, Bennington College and Harvard University and is a recipient of the 1991 Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

 

William Kloefkorn

Emeritus Professor, Nebraska Wesleyan College and Nebraska's State Poet Laureate

William Kloefkorn is nationally recognized for his poetry and creative nonfiction. He has published several collections of poetry, including Drinking the Tin Cup Dry, Alvin Turner as Farmer, Dragging Sand Creek for Minnows, Cottonwood County, and Still Life Moving. His three memoirs, This Death by Drowning, Restoring the Burnt Child, and At Home on this Moveable Earth, have received excellent reviews and are taught in many creative nonfiction programs nationally. His fourth memoir, Breathing in the Fullness of Time, is forthcoming.

 

Diane Dufva Quantic

Emertius Professor, Wichita State University

Diane Dufva Quantic is the author of The Nature of Place: A Study of Great Plains Fiction and A Great Plains Reader. She taught English at Wichita State University for many years before retiring in 2007. A former President of the Western Literature Association, she has published numerous articles on Great Plains literature in such journals as Western American Literature, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, and American Studies.

 

Jim Reese

Assistant Professor, Mount Marty College, Yankton, South Dakota

Jim Reese is an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of the Great Plains Writers' Tour at Mount Marty College in Yankton, South Dakota and the Editor-in-Chief of PADDLEFISH. Reese's poetry and prose have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies: New York Quarterly, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Paterson Literary Review, South Dakota Review, New Delta Review and elsewhere. His most recent collection of poetry is These Trespasses (Backwaters Press, 2005, 2006). Poems from this new book were recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Reese is also the 2008 National Endowment for the Art’s Writer-in-Residence at the Yankton Federal Prison Camp.

 

Donald Worster

Hall Distinguished Professor of American History, University of Kansas

Donald Worster is one of the foremost experts on environmental and agricultural hsitory, as well as of the frontier and West of the United States. His highly acclaimed studies, including A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West, and Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains of the 1930s, represent groundbreaking work.