Founded in 1997, the Backwaters Press has worked to produce award-winning books by some of America’s finest authors. UNP acquired Backwaters in 2018, adding an impressive backlist in poetry and prose that contributes to the cultural landscape of our state … Continue reading Backwaters Press News
Tom Gannon is an Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, author of Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic and Contemporary Native American Literature (Nebraska, 2009), and an enrolled member of the Cheyenne … Continue reading New Laurels for the Joy of Native Poetry
Former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser turns eighty years young today. A near lifelong Nebraska resident, Kooser is one of the iconic poets of the Midwest and has published seven books of poetry with the University of Nebraska Press as well … Continue reading Happy 80th Birthday, Ted Kooser!
John Sibley Williams serves as editor of the Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. He is the author of four poetry collections, including As One Fire Consumes Another, which won the Orison Poetry Prize; Disinheritance; and Controlled Hallucinations. He lives in Portland, Oregon. He is … Continue reading From the Desk of John Sibley Williams: Don’t Assume It’s All True
Gabriel Okara was born at Bumoundi, Bayelsa State, in the Niger Delta in 1921 and educated at Government College Umuahia in Nigeria and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He worked as a bookbinder and printer for Federal Government Press at … Continue reading Remembering Poet Gabriel Okara
The Word Sender Award from the John G. Neihardt Foundation is given annually to someone dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the life and works of Neihardt. For the first time it was given to an organization this year. … Continue reading UNP honored for supporting works of John G. Neihardt
Rosemary Sekora is the publicity manager at UNP and not a poet. The New York Times Magazine featured Tracy K. Smith, the U.S. poet laureate and her mission to bring poems to the masses as an antidote to the current toxic … Continue reading The Marketeers Club: Poets Supporting Poets
Writer and poet Philip F. Deaver passed away last month at a hospice in Orlando, Florida. He was seventy-one years old. Deaver was the author of How Men Pray and Silent Retreats and winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He was … Continue reading Remembering Philip K. Deaver
The Fascicles of Emily Dickinson First of all, such a fussy word—little bundles of nerve sewn up and plunged in a trunk, sewn with a needle that must have pricked her, and how she must have sucked her finger promising … Continue reading Commentary on “The Fascicles of Emily Dickinson”
A Nebraska native, Mary K. Stillwell has studied writing in New York and, with Ted Kooser, on the plains and earned her PhD in plains literature from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She served as coeditor of Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of … Continue reading From the Desk of Mary K. Stillwell: 2018 One Book One Nebraska
