Nebraska Poets

Scott Abels is the author of the chapbooks A State of The Union Speech (Beard of Bees Press, 2015) and Nebraska Fantastic (Beard of Bees Press, 2012), as well as the full-length books Rambo Goes to Idaho (BlazeVox, 2011) and New City (BlazeVox, 2015).

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He is an instructor for Foundational English and English as a Second Language. Bachelor of English Literature, Chadron State College; MFA in Creative Writing (poetry emphasis), Boise State University.

Lucy Adkins' poetry has been published in many journals including Poet Lore, Red Wheelbarrow, South Dakota Review and the anthologies Crazy Woman Creek, Women Write Resistance and the Poets Against the War anthology.

Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart prize, and she has also co-authored two books of non-fiction,  Writing in Community, recipient of an “Ippy” in the Independent Publishers Book Awards; and The Fire Inside. Her poetry chapbook, Two-Toned Dress, was a winner of the 2019 Blue Light Press chapbook contest, as well as a Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. Her first full-length poetry collection, A Crazy Little Thing is forthcoming from Wayne State College Press.

Jeff Alessandrelli is most recently the author of the book And Yet (Future Tense Books, 2024). The Kenyon Review called his 2019 poetry collection Fur Not Light an “example of radical humility…its poems enact a quiet but persistent empathy in the world of creative writing.”

Recent work by Alessandrelli appears or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, and Buckmxn Journal. In addition to his writing Jeff also directs the nonprofit book press/record label Fonograf Editions. Before moving to Portland, he lived in Lincoln.

Hadara Bar-Nadav is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, a fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and other honors.

Her books include The Animal Is Chemical (Four Way Books, 2024), awarded the Levis Prize in Poetry, selected by Jericho Brown; The New Nudity (Saturnalia Books, 2017); Lullaby (with Exit Sign) (Saturnalia Books, 2013), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012), Editor’s Selection/Runner Up for the Green Rose Prize; and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007), awarded the Margie Book Prize.  

She is also the author of two chapbooks, Fountain and Furnace (Tupelo Press, 2015), awarded the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and Show Me Yours (Laurel Review/Green Tower Press 2010), awarded the Midwest Poets Series Prize.  In addition, she is co-author with Michelle Boisseau of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. (Pearson, 2011).

Her poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. A current reader for Poetry, she is a Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She received her Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Ryan Boyland is a writer, wanderer, medical student, and amateur astronomer currently based out of Omaha, Nebraska, where his love for both science and poetry motivates him to combine the two at every opportunity.   

His work addresses issues of identity, love, and death. And stars. Because they’re cool. His goal through his performance is to touch minds and hearts around the world and considers it a victory every time he can do so.

Ryan and his work have been featured on Button Poetry, Poets and Writers, Nebraska Public Media, through Larksong Writers’ Place, in Omaha Magazine, The Cookout Literary Journal, and can be found on SoundCloud, Facebook, and YouTube. When not writing, Ryan enjoys listening to music, stargazing, and being Black, mixed in with the occasional intense discussion regarding the validity of the Star Wars prequels.

John Brehm is the author of four books of original poetry: Sea of Faith, Help Is on the Way, No Day at the Beach, and most recently, Dharma Talk. He’s also the author of a book of essays, The Dharma of Poetry: How Poems Can Deepen Your Spiritual Practice and Open You to Joy, and the editor of the bestselling anthology The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy, both from Wisdom Publications.

With his wife, Felden­krais teacher Alice Boyd, he leads mindfulness retreats that incorporate Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement lessons, meditation, and mindful poetry discussions. He lives in Portland, Oregon, but misses Lincoln. Learn more on his website.

Michael Catherwood's awards include a Nebraska Arts Council Grant, Pushcart Nomination, The Holt Prize for Poetry, and Finalist for the Ruth Lily Prize. His newest book, Near Misses, is forthcoming from WSC Press. His previous books are Dare, If You Turned Around Quickly, and Projector from Stephen F. Austin Press. He is former editor at The Backwaters Press and has been Associate Editor at Plainsongs since 1995.

Recent poems have appeared in The Common, Pennsylvania English, I-70 Review, and Common Ground Review. He’s a cancer survivor is recently retired and lives in Omaha with his wife Cindy.

Chad M. Christensen is the managing editor of the WSC Press, director of the Plains Writers Series, and an associate professor at Wayne State College, where he teaches publishing and creative writing.

His books of lo-fi poetry are Ground Bound and Shoot from the Hip (Pseudo Poseur Productions), and his latest poems have appeared in Sugar House Review and  Plainsong. He also writes a column for The Big Smoke called “Boy with Shovel.”

Adrienne Christian is the author of three poetry collections: Worn, A Proper Lover, and 12023 Woodmont Avenue (2013). Common themes in her work are family, love, and African-American life. Adrienne's poetry, prose, and photographs have been featured in Prairie Schooner, Hayden's Ferry Review, Phoebe, CALYX, Today's Black Woman, Jolie, The Los Angeles Review, and dozens of others.

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In 2020, she earned her PhD in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska. In 2011, she earned her MFA in English with a concentration in Contemporary Poetics from Pacific University. And In 2001, she earned her BA in English with a concentration in 19th Century British Literature from the University of Michigan.

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In 2020, Adrienne was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and won the Common Ground poetry award. In 2016, she was a finalist for the Rita Dove International Poetry Award. In 2007, she won the University of Michigan's Five Under Five Ten Young Alumni Recognition Award.

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). 

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of HOST (Wisconsin Poetry Series, 2024), tether (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), Errata (Southern Illinois University, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, In the Carnival of Breathing (BLP, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, Small Girl: Micromemoirs (Harbor Editions, 2024), and she is the editor of In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (BLP, 2023).

Her poetry has been awarded an NEA Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, chosen by Dana Levin, and the 2021 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz. Recent prose & poetry appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Barrelhouse, Brevity, North American Review, The Massachusetts Review, and on The Slowdown. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry & CNF in the Writer’s Workshop at UNO.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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).

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. 

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.

Charlene Pierce, a poet and teaching artist, creates welcoming spaces for writers to deepen their craft and connect in community. She is the founder and President of the Nebraska Poetry Society (launched in 2020) to foster accessibility, equity, and community in the literary arts.

A Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Net finalist, her work appears in Poetry Foundation, TriQuarterly, Whale Road Review, The Good Life Review, and 805 Lit + Art, among others, and has been anthologized in Until There Are No Words Left and Misbehaving Nebraskans.

The Poetry Foundation selected her to teach a poetry workshop, publish a craft essay, and give a public reading for the Form and Features Series.

She has an MFA from Pacific University where she was a Merit Scholar. Her work is rooted in justice, restoration, and the belief that poetry can help us return to ourselves and to one another.

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.