Grace Bauer’s collection Unholy Heart: New & Selected Poems has been accepted by the University of Nebraska Press for their Backwaters Press imprint and is due out in Spring 2021.

Joy Castro’s short story “High Country” appeared in Contra Viento. Her short story “Woodwork” appeared in Reed.

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s article on experimental film pioneer Barbara Hammer’s first documentary feature, Nitrate Kisses, is forthcoming in Senses of Cinema. Some of you may recall that Foster interviewed Barbara Hammer and introduced Barbara with a brief lecture on Nitrate Kisses at the premiere of the film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the early 1990s. Nitrate Kisses is a study of erased lesbian sexuality: the section of the film on Willa Cather was shot in Nebraska.

Pascha Sotolongo Stevenson’s short story “Ember” has been accepted for publication in American Short Fiction.

On June 8, Adrian S. Wisnicki launched a new digital humanities project called One More Voice. As the home pages states, the project “focuses on recovering non-European contributions from nineteenth-century British imperial and colonial archives. The name reflects the fact that there is always one more voice to recover from the archives. The non-European contributions take multiple forms and appear in multiple genres, including travel narratives, autobiographies, letters, diaries, testimonies, interviews, treaties, maps, oral histories, genealogies, and vocabularies. One More Voice attempts to offer a critical and systematic evaluation of these rich and diverse materials by using interpretive approaches and digital preservation techniques that expand existing scholarship on the topic.” The project grows in direct response to the Coronavirus pandemic and has given Wisnicki and his collaborators a chance to focus their energies on a topic of interest, while making a positive public contribution at a challenging time. The project takes Wisnicki’s prior Livingstone Online research in a new direction and includes a number of newly published, open-access primary materials and artifacts that instructors might find useful for their courses in the fall. Those interested in the project should also note that new contributors are actively being sought, and the project has devised an “agile publication strategy” to encourage participation.

Erika Luckert had poems published in Cordite Poetry Review, Barren Magazine, and Barely South Review.

UNL Ph.D. recipient and lecturer Chris Harding Thornton’s debut novel, Pickard County Atlas, will be released by MCD/FSG, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, on January 5, 2021 (preorders available through Bookshop, Amazon, Target, and Barnes & Noble). Her review of UNL Ph.D. recipient Adrian Koester’s second novel, Miraculous Medal, is forthcoming in The Colorado Review.

Wheeler Winston Dixon’s film Pandemic was selected as part of the online program COVIDEO-19 NOTES, curated by the Undercurrent Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, April 22 – June 30, 2020.

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster was the Guest Video Artist for the annual Bi Arts Fest in Toronto. Several of her shorts were screened during the Lost and Found: Adventures in Bi+ panel, streamed on June 8th for Pride Month. Foster attended virtually. Her protest film, Making America Straight and White Again, which mimics the horror of the current climate of racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and white supremacism in America, streamed at the Splice Film Fest from Brooklyn on June 20. Foster’s Mass for Shut-ins, an abstract 16mm hand-painted film created during the early days of the pandemic, was curated by Undercurrent Gallery in Brooklyn, for COVID 19 Notes: A Living Virtual Project. Mass for Shut ins, along with Lullaby for a Pandemic, were curated by Agora-Off Espace Culturel, for Agora On, a group installation in Paris. These two films also streamed in Exploding Cinema’s Covid Bunker screening from London, which Foster attended via Zoom. In June, Foster’s Dada Ship played at the Connect Video Art Festival at the University of Tampa, as well as at Grrl Haus in Berlin. It will screen at Athens International Film + Video Festival at Ohio University and at The North Bellarine Film Festival in Victoria, Australia in the fall.

Kristi Carter gave a (well-attended!) Zoom reading from her new book Aria Viscera (April Gloaming) on June 17th. Thank you to all who attended!

Steve Buhler discussed pandemic reading strategies and selections with host Pat Leach on a recent episode of NET Radio’s All About Books. The authors that Steve recommended were James Baldwin, Joe Ide, and George Eliot.

Ted Kooser has been awarded a Pushcart Prize for his poem “A Town Somewhere,” published in Rattle. This is Ted’s fifth Pushcart Prize. He says that one good thing about being in his eighth decade is that he’s had plenty of years in which to win prizes. Young writers take heart!