First Friday Reading & Book Talk Series (Read More)
This monthly online (Zoom) reading series called First Friday Readings features authors with Nebraska connections, national presence, and a newly published book. The hourlong event, moderated by Larksong director Karen Shoemaker, will include both the author’s reading and Q&A with the audience. The event is free, but registration is required to receive the link. July 5 Daniel Simon, poet and publisher August 2 Anna Monardo, fiction writer, memoirist, and professor September 6 Shanan Ballam, Poet Laureate of Logan, Utah October 4 Terese Svoboda, fiction writer November 1, 2024 William Trowbridge, poet, former Poet Laureate of Missouri
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First Friday Book Talk & Reading w Katherine Higgs-Coulthard (Read More)
This monthly online (Zoom) reading series called First Friday Readings features authors with Nebraska connections, national presence, and a newly published book. The hourlong event, moderated by Larksong director Karen Shoemaker, will include both the author’s reading and Q&A with the audience. The event is free, but registration is required to receive the link. Kat Higgs-Coulthard is a graduate of University of Nebraska at Omaha and the author of Junkyard Dogs, described by Kirkus as "A mean-streets-style tale raw in language and feeling alike . . .visceral." Her work has appeared in Cleaver, Women on Writing, and School Library Journal. She is an associate professor of Education at Saint Mary’s College and Director of Michiana Writers' Center. She lives in Niles, Michigan.
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First Friday Book Talk & Reading w Lee Ann Roripaugh (Read More)
This monthly online (Zoom) reading series called First Friday Readings features authors with Nebraska connections, national presence, and a newly published book. The hourlong event, moderated by Larksong director Karen Shoemaker, will include both the author’s reading and Q&A with the audience. The event is free, but registration is required to receive the link. Lee Ann Roripaugh is the author of four volumes of poetry, the most recent of which, Dandarians, was released by Milkweed Editions in September 2014. Her second volume, Year of the Snake (Southern Illinois University Press), was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and her first book, Beyond Heart Mountain (Penguin Books), was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. The recipient of a 2003 Archibald Bush Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship, she was also named the 2004 winner of the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the 2001 winner of the Frederick Manfred Award for Best Creative Writing awarded by the Western Literature Association, and the 1995 winner of the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize. Her short stories have been shortlisted as stories of note in the Pushcart Prize anthologies, and two of her essays have been shortlisted as essays of note for the Best American Essays anthology. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Roripaugh is currently a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where she serves as Director of Creative Writing and Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review.
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First Friday Book Talk & Reading w Timothy Schaffert (Read More)
This monthly online (Zoom) reading series called First Friday Readings features authors with Nebraska connections, national presence, and a newly published book. The hourlong event, moderated by Larksong director Karen Shoemaker, will include both the author’s reading and Q&A with the audience. The event is free, but registration is required to receive the link. Timothy Schaffert is the author of six novels, most recently THE PERFUME THIEF (Doubleday; August, 2021). His other books include: THE SWAN GONDOLA (Riverhead/Penguin); THE COFFINS OF LITTLE HOPE, DEVILS IN THE SUGAR SHOP, THE SINGING AND DANCING DAUGHTERS OF GOD and THE PHANTOM LIMBS OF THE ROLLOW SISTERS (all from Unbridled Books). He has served as editor of two books from University of Nebraska Press: YOU WILL NEVER SEE ANY GOD (stories by Ervin Krause); and MORE IN TIME: A TRIBUTE TO TED KOOSER, with Jessica Poli and Marco Abel. His books have been selected as an Indie Next pick, and for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers program, and recommended as a New York Times Editors' Choice. THE SWAN GONDOLA was an Oprah.com Book of the Week, and a recommended read from Good Housekeeping, People, The Week, Library Journal, Booklist, & Historical Novel Review.
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First Friday Book Talk & Reading with Pamela Petro (Read More)
This monthly online (Zoom) reading series called First Friday Readings features authors with Nebraska connections, national presence, and a newly published book. The hourlong event, moderated by Larksong director Karen Shoemaker, will include both the author’s reading and Q&A with the audience. The event is free, but registration is required to receive the link. Pamela Petro is an author, artist, and educator living in Northampton, MA, with her partner, Marguerite, and Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Topaz. She has written four books of creative nonfiction including her latest, The Long Field – Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir, as well as Travels in an Old Tongue, also about Wales; Sitting up with the Dead, about the American South; and The Slow Breath of Stone, about Southwest France. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, The Atlantic, Granta, Guernica, The Paris Review, and others. The Long Field was shortlisted for The Wales Book of the Year Award and was named to Top Ten Travel Book lists by The Financial Times and The Sunday Telegraph. Pamela teaches creative writing at Smith College and on Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, and is co-Director of the Dylan Thomas Summer School at the University of Wales, Trinity St Davids, where she is also a Fellow. She has widely exhibited her photography and has also created an artist book, AfterShadows - A Grand Canyon Narrative, and a graphic script, Under Paradise Valley.
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First Friday Book Talk & Reading with Carson Vaughan (Read More)
This monthly online (Zoom) reading series called First Friday Readings features authors with Nebraska connections, national presence, and a newly published book. The hourlong event, moderated by Larksong director Karen Shoemaker, will include both the author’s reading and Q&A with the audience. The event is free, but registration is required to receive the link. Carson Vaughan is a freelance journalist from central Nebraska with a focus on the Great Plains. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker (online), The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Paris Review Daily, Outside, Pacific Standard, VICE, In These Times, and more. Most recently, he was awarded the 2018 John M. Collier Award for Forest History Journalism from the Forest History Society for his Weather Channel feature, “Uprooting FDR’s ‘Great Wall of Trees.’” He was also a recipient of a 2018 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council. His first book, Zoo Nebraska: The Dismantling of an American Dream, was published by Little A in April 2019 and earned a 2020 Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction (Investigative Reporting) from the Nebraska Library Commission.
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First Friday Book Talk & Reading with Nancy Welch (Read More)
This monthly online (Zoom) reading series called First Friday Readings features authors with Nebraska connections, national presence, and a newly published book. The hourlong event, moderated by Larksong director Karen Shoemaker, will include both the author’s reading and Q&A with the audience. The event is free, but registration is required to receive the link. Nancy Welch’s latest collection of short stories Ten More Things About Us received the 2023 Black Lawrence Press Prize for Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, and elsewhere with citations in Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, O. Henry, and Pushcart. Her debut collection, The Road from Prosperity, was published by Southern Methodist University Press. Her political essays on caretaking labor and higher education have appeared in Spectre, Tempest, International Socialist Review, and other journals. Professor of English Emerita at the University of Vermont, she lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, where she has returned to horseback riding after a forty-year hiatus and is embracing her identities as a writer and barn rat.
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First Friday Book Talk & Reading w/ Kevin Clouther (Read More)
This monthly online (Zoom) reading series called First Friday Readings features authors with Nebraska connections, national presence, and a newly published book. The hourlong event, moderated by Larksong director Karen Shoemaker, will include both the author's reading and Q&A with the audience. The event is free, but registration is required to receive the link. Kevin Clouther's second story collection, Maximum Speed, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in November 2023. He is the author of We Were Flying to Chicago: Stories (Catapult). His stories have appeared in Confrontation, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Joyland, and Ruminate, among other journals. He holds degrees from the University of Virginia and Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the recipient of the Richard Yates Fiction Award and Gell Residency Award. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha Writer’s Workshop, where he directs the MFA in Writing. He lives with his wife and two children in Omaha.
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First Friday Book Talk & Reading with Jessica Hendry Nelson (Read More)
This monthly online (Zoom) reading series called First Friday Readings features authors with Nebraska connections, national presence, and a newly published book. The hourlong event, moderated by Larksong director Karen Shoemaker, will include both the author's reading and Q&A with the audience. The event is free, but registration is required to receive the link. Jessica Hendry Nelson's upcoming memoir Joy Rides through the Tunnel of Grief was the winner of the AWP Sue William Silverman Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She is the author of the memoir If Only You People Could Follow Directions (2014), which was selected as a best debut book by the Indies Introduce New Voices program, the Indies Next List by the American Booksellers' Association, named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Review, received starred reviews in Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly, and reviewed nationally in print and on NPR—including twice in (O) Oprah Magazine. It was also a finalist for the Vermont Book Award. She is also co-author of the textbook and anthology Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2021) along with the writer Sean Prentiss . Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Tin House, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Carolina Quarterly, Columbia Journal, Painted Bride Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, PANK, Drunken Boat and elsewhere. She is Assistant Professor in the MFA program and English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University and on faculty in the MFA Program at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.
