Nebraska Poets Reading Series

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s most recent honors include 2023 Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lecture. Her most recent book, Look at This Blue, was a 2022 National Book Award Finalist, a CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist, an ASLE Book of the Year Finalist, and won the 2022-2023 Emory Elliott Book Award.

 

In 2021, she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters and awarded the 2021 AWP George Garrett Award from AWP. Hedge Coke was selected for an inaugural Legacy Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council (2021-2022), and recently awarded the UCR Dean’s Mellon Professorship (2022-2023). 

An American Book Award winning author and 2016 Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellow, she has written or edited 18 books and is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing for the University of California Riverside, where she directs UCR Writers Week Festival, directs the Medical Health and Humanities Designated Emphasis in the School of Medicine, where she teaches Death and Dying and Narrative Medicine, and is affiliated faculty for the newUCR department of Society, Health Equity, and Sustainability. 

Hedge Coke was the founder/director of the Literary Arts Crane Retreat and Sandhill Crane festival in Alda and Kearney, Nebraska and served as the Distinguished Paul and Clarice Reynolds Chair for the University of Nebraska system and taught for UNK and UNO for nine years (cumulative). ​

​

FREE and Open to the Public

Kim McNealy Sosin is a retired university professor of economics who eagerly took up writing poetry and photography in retirement, making her a “new poet” in her seventies. She loves to create ekphrastic poetry using her own travel photographs.  

 

Her poems and photographs have appeared in publications including Raw Art Review, Fine Lines (poems and several cover photos), Failed Haiku, Voices from the Plains, Verses from the Plains (several poems and cover design), Landscape Photography Magazine, The Heron’s Nest, The Good Life Review (poem and cover photo), Wanderlust Journal, Ekphrastic Review, and Sandcutters.  

 

She published her first poetry chapbook, Not Quite on Grand Avenue: Poems of the Early Years, which explores the challenges and joys of growing up as a young girl in a rural town in the forties and fifties. Her second chapbook is coming out in the fall with poems by a co-author Janet Rives and Sosin’s photographs of France. Reflections of France: Images and Poems.

​

FREE and Open to the Public

Judy Lorenzen is a poet, writer, and teaching artist. Her education includes a Doctorate of English, Composition and Rhetoric, December 2016, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Dissertation: Teaching Place: Heritage, Home and Community, the Heart of Education; Master of Art in Creative Writing, May 2008, University of Nebraska at Kearney, Thesis: Let Autumn Come; Doctorate of Theology, May 2000, Andersonville Theological Seminary; Master of Science in Community Counseling, May 1998, University of Nebraska at Kearney; and a Bachelor of Arts in English, Emphasis in Writing, Philosophy Minor, May 1995, University of Nebraska at Kearney.

 

Her first book, Turning Back to Her Love Pages, was published in June 2025. She is now hoping to find a home for her second book, Seasons of Reverence. Her online publications include Jama’s Alphabet Soup, Blue Lake Review, Verse-Virtual, North Dakota Quarterly, Front Porch Review, Silver Birch Press, Super Poetry Highway, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, Dirigible Balloon, and Blue Heron Review among others.

​

FREE and Open to the Public

Mark Sanders is a Nebraska native, born in Creighton and raised on the eastern rim of the Sandhills at Ord.

 

Among his books of poetry are The Suicide (1988), Before We Lost Our Ways (1996), Here in the Big Empty (2006), Conditions of Grace: New and Selected Poems (2011), Landscapes, with Horses (2018), and In a Good Time (2019).  The latter two books received Nebraska Book Awards; Landscapes, with Horses was awarded the 2019 Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.  

 

His edited works include A Sandhills Reader: 30 Years of Great Writing from the Great Plains and The Weight of the Weather: Regarding the Poetry of Ted Kooser, both recipients of the Nebraska Book Award, in 2016 and 2018 respectively.  

 

In 2007, he was awarded the Mildred Bennett Award for fostering Nebraska’s literary heritage.  His most recent book is Homecoming Parade:  Memoir  (2024), and his next book of poems, The Messiah Horse:  Poems 1988-2025, is forthcoming in 2027.  

 

He and his wife operate a small farm devoted to big dogs and horses in east Texas.

​

FREE and Open to the Public

Kiara Nicole Letcher is the author of Oxblood, (Agape Editions, 2024) and the chapbook Scream Queen (Orchard Street Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in South Dakota Review, Green Mountains Review, Plainsongs Magazine, Solstice Literary Magazine, Querencia Press, Mulberry Literary and Laurel Review, among other publications.

 

She received her MFA from The University of Nebraska at Omaha and previously served as a Board Member for the Nebraska Writer’s Collective. She was the 2024 and 2025 Keynote Speaker for the Nebraska Scholastic Writing Awards and a Nebraska State Poet Nominee. You can find her at her website or on Instagram @kiaranicolebang.

​

FREE and Open to the Public

Gene Fendt taught at UNK, where he was Albertus Magnus Professor of Philosophy, for about 40 years and was blessed to have Don Welch for a colleague through most of those decades.

 

Besides the usual (and unusual) scholarly publications, he also wrote and published poetry in numerous journals winning several awards including Gemini magazine's open poetry competition (nominated for a Pushcart), the Princemere Poetry Prize, and two Nebraska Individual Artist Fellowships.

 

Together with Don Welch he authored The Cranes, A Book of Hours which was written out by noted Nebraska calligrapher Arthur Pierce. His first book of poetry, Eternal Life and other poems was published by Angelico Press of Brooklyn NY in 2025. ​

​

FREE and Open to the Public

Kelly Madigan is a poet, essayist and conservation advocate living in the Loess Hills of western Iowa. She previously resided in Nebraska for over 30 years.

 

Her work has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Distinguished Artist Award from the Nebraska Arts Council.

 

In 2020, Kelly walked the entire length of the Loess Hills in Iowa in an effort to understand her landscape on foot. In 2013, she crossed the Nebraska panhandle on foot.

 

Her books include The Edge of Known Things (SFASU Press) and Getting Sober (McGraw-Hill).

​

FREE and Open to the Public

Judy Brackett Crowe, born in Fremont, Nebraska, has lived in the California foothills of the northern Sierra Nevada for many years. Her poems have appeared in Oberon, Fish Anthology, Epoch, The Maine Review, The MacGuffin, Commonweal, Cloudbank, Subtropics, and elsewhere.

 

She has taught English and creative writing at Sierra College and is a longtime member of the Community of Writers. Her chapbook, Flat Water: Nebraska Poems, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry book, The Watching Sky, was published by Cornerstone Press in 2024 and received the Nebraska Book Award in Poetry for 2025.

​

FREE and Open to the Public

Greg Kosmicki has published eight chapbooks and seven full-length collections of poetry with ten different presses. His most recent collection, The dog has no answers, was published in September, 2023, by Main Street Rag Publishing Co. His 2016 collection, It's As Good Here as it Gets Anywhere, from Logan House Press, was a finalist for the 2017 High Plains Book Award.

 

Individual poems of his have been published in Paris Review, New Letters, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, Kansas Quarterly, Briar Cliff Review, Laurel Review, Poetry NOW, and many others. His poems have been selected to be read on "Writer's Almanac." He has twice been awarded an Artist's Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council for his poetry.

 

In 1998, he founded The Backwaters Press, which published more than 100 books under his direction, until it was given to the University of Nebraska Press in 2017 as an imprint of that press. The University press continues to offer The Backwaters Prize for poetry collections, which he started in 2000.

 

Greg also works creatively as an abstract painter. He and his wife of 52 years, Debbie, are retired and live in Omaha, Nebraska, where he continues to write and paint. 

​

FREE and Open to the Public

Maria Nazos grew up in Athens, Greece, and Joliet, Illinois. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, TriQuarterly, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.

 

She’s the author of the poetry collection PULSE (Omnidawn, 2026) and the translation collection The Slow Horizon that Breathes (World Poetry Books, 2023) from the poet Dimitra Kotoula, longlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award.

 

Maria has worked almost every job, including as a whale watch boat attendant, table dancer, teacher, barista, sunglass salesperson, bartender, and probably the worst waitress in the entire history of the Eastern seaboard. If she spilled Pinot Noir on you, she apologizes.

​

FREE and Open to the Public

Chuck Peek is a Provincetown storyteller who musician Zoe Lewis called “one of the magic people we have met on the road of life,” and some witty guy once dubbed him “the Johnathan Winters of Willa Cather Scholars.”

 

His curriculum vita began by citing driving the Etoile in Paris at morning rush hour and holding the liquor license for the Cather Foundation. One book, two chapbooks, and dozens of individual poems later (one of them in Ted Kooser’s This American Life in Poetry,) someone decided he was a poet. All that while he taught at four universities as academia in America crumbled.

​

FREE and Open to the Public

Brad Aaron Modlin came to Nebraska to be a professor/The Reynolds Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at University of Nebraska, Kearney and teach undergraduates & in the online creative writing master’s program. The sandhill cranes were a bonus!

 

His internationally viral poetry has been experienced two million times. His book Everyone at This Party Has Two Names is available from Black Lawrence Press. His work appears in the Pushcart Prize anthology; Brevity; Poetry Unbound; The Slowdown; & The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Also orchestral scores, Australian art galleries, Brooklyn public art, and his grampa’s refrigerator.

 

He has received support from the Banff Centre, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, & the Nebraska Arts Council. He likes talking with strangers and asking friends to share examples of hope. 

​

FREE and Open to the Public

Todd Robinson is the author of Mass for Shut-Ins (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) and Note at Heart Rock (Main Street Rag, 2012). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Rattle, North American Review, and Rhino.

 

He is an Associate Professor in the Writer's Workshop at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and caregiver to his partner, a disabled physician. 

​

FREE and Open to the Public