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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Voices at Larksong (fourth Thursday): JV Brummels and Chad Christensen (Read More)
A monthly in-house reading series with new guests each month, beginning with social time at 5:30 pm followed by the reading/music from 6:00 – 7:30 pm. Guests will include writers of all genres and (frequently) musicians. Thursday, June 27, 2024 features JV Brummels and Chad Christensen. JV Brummels’ fifth collection, City at War, was published by The Backwaters Press in late 2009. His work has been recognized with a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Elkhorn Prize and the Mildred Bennett Award for contributions to the state’s literature from the Nebraska Center for the Book. His Book of Grass was awarded the 2008 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. Raised first on a farm and later on a ranch, he was educated at the University of Nebraska and later Syracuse University. In 1984 he began a horseback cattle outfit to raise natural, grass-fed beef, which he still operates. A longtime professor at Wayne State College, he’s also written and published short fiction and a novel. For the last 20 years he’s served as publisher of Logan House, co-founded with Jim Reese, which specializes in contemporary American poetry. In 2006 he was named director of the newly created WSC Press. Chad Christensen is a professor of English at Wayne State College. He also serves as the Managing Editor of the WSC Press and director of the Plains Writers Series. He teaches creative writing (poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction), editing, publishing, and literature. He’s also the advisor for the student literary magazine Judas Goat and the WSC Poetry and Fiction Slams. He’s been teaching full time at Wayne State College since 2012 and received the Balsley Whitmore Excellence in Teaching Award in 2015 and 2020.
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Third Thursdays – Voices at Larksong: Julie Paschold and Kelly Weber (Read More)
A monthly in-house reading series with new guests each month, beginning with social time at 5:30 pm followed by the reading/music from 6:00 – 7:30 pm. Guests will include writers of all genres and (frequently) musicians. Thursday, May 16, 2024 features poets Julie Paschold and Kelly Weber. Julie S. Paschold (Tansy Julie the Soaring Eagle) is a queer disabled poet and artist from Nebraska. They have their BS and MS in agronomy from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Their first book, Horizons (Atmosphere Press) is a collection of poetry honoring soil, one of our nonrenewable resources. Julie has been published in AKA’s Advocate, Fine Lines, Plainsongs, The Awakenings Review, the Nebraska Writer’s Guild, The Raven’s Perch, Iconoclast, The Radical Teacher, and several publications on medium.com. Two of their chapbooks won honorable mention in contests by Writer's Digest in 2021 and 2022. Julie sells their sketches at Ravenwood in Norfolk, NE. Kelly Weber (they/she) is the author of We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place (Tupelo Press, 2022) and You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis, winner of the 2022 Omnidawn First/Second Book Prize (forthcoming December 2023). They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Pleaides, Waxwing, Gulf Coast Online, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University.
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Third Thursdays – Voices at Larksong: Speculative Fiction Writers Group (Read More)
A monthly in-house reading series with new guests each month, beginning with social time at 5:30 pm followed by the reading/music from 6:00 – 7:30 pm. Guests will include writers of all genres and (frequently) musicians. Thursday, April 18, 2024, features writers from Larksong's Speculative Fiction Writers Group.
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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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Third Thursdays – Voices at Larksong: Amy Haddad & Carolina Hotchandani (Read More)
A monthly in-house reading series with new guests each month, beginning with social time at 5:30 pm followed by the reading/music from 6:00 – 7:30 pm. Guests will include writers of all genres and (frequently) musicians. Thursday, March 21, 2024, features poets Amy Haddad and Carolina Hotchandani. Amy Haddad is the 2019 recipient of the Annals of Internal Medicine poetry prize for “Families Like This” for the best poem published in the journal. She won third-place for the 2019 Kalanithi Writing Awards from Stanford University for her poem “Dark Rides.” Her chapbook, “The Geography of Kitchens,” was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. Her first poetry collection, “An Otherwise Healthy Woman,” was published by Backwaters Press, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press in early 2022. “An Otherwise Healthy Woman” was awarded twice in the 2022 AJN Book of the Year Awards: first place in the Creative Works Category and second place in the Professional Issues Category. Carolina Hotchandani is the author of The Book Eaters, 2023 Perugia Press Prize Winner, which was one of the ten debut poetry books featured in the 2024 Poets & Writers Magazine’s Debut Poets issue. Hotchandani holds degrees from Brown, Texas State, and Northwestern universities and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Community of Writers, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and Tin House Writers’ Workshop. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska, where she lives with her husband and daughter.
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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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Third Thursdays – Voices at Larksong: Carla Ketner and Paula Wallace (Read More)
*Please Note this is a date change from regular programing! Moving December's Third Thursday to November' Fifth Thursday* A monthly in-house reading series with new guests each month, beginning with social time at 5:30 pm followed by the reading/music from 6:00 – 7:30 pm. Guests will include writers of all genres and (frequently) musicians. Thursday, November 30 will be a bonus event in November, featuring Carla Ketner and Paula Wallace (author and Illustrator of "More than a Local Wonder") Carla Ketner is a former elementary school teacher and instructor of college-level children’s literature courses who now owns and manages Chapters Books & Gifts on the historic courthouse square in Ted Kooser’s home, small-town Seward, Nebraska. Ted Kooser: More than a Local Wonder is her debut publication, but she's been writing for many years, practicing her craft and developing her skills, finding her voice as a writer. Paula Wallace has written and illustrated her own books, including Choose Your Days (Cinco Puntos Press/Lee&Low)) and Mr. Reginald and the Bunnies (Pomegranate). Choose Your Days won the Nebraska Children’s Picture Book Award and represented Nebraska at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. in 2018. Her book, Mr. Reginald and the Bunnies, was a finalist for the 2019 Children’s Picture Book Illustration Award from Foreword Reviews. Her most recent collaboration with author Carla Ketner was on a picturebook boyhood biography of national Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser.
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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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Third Thursdays – Voices at Larksong: Nebraska Warrior Writers Open Mic Night (Read More)
A monthly in-house reading series with new guests each month, beginning with social time at 5:30 pm followed by the reading/music from 6:00 – 7:30 pm. Guests will include writers of all genres and (frequently) musicians. Thursday, November 16 features writers from the Nebraska Warrior Writers group.
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Third Thursdays – Voices at Larksong: Michael James & Brad Anderson (Read More)
A monthly in-house reading series with new guests each month, beginning with social time at 5:30 pm followed by the reading/music from 6:00 – 7:30 pm. Guests will include writers of all genres and (frequently) musicians. Thursday, October 19 features memoirist Michael James and poet Brad Anderson. Trained as a visual artist, Michael James has had an unconventional career in both the private sector and academia. His textile art is included in numerous public and private collections, including those of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and many more. He joined the faculty of the Department of Textiles at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2000, concluding that tenure twenty years later as Professor Emeritus and Chair Emeritus. He is the recipient of two Visual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an NEA-sponsored USA–France Exchange Fellowship. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he continues studio and writing practices, and helps to sustain connections among a close-knit group of husband caregivers of dementia sufferers. Brad Anderson lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, and married his high school sweetheart, LuAnne Rose (Shaw) Anderson, when they were both 19. LuAnne died from Alzheimer’s on January 20, 2017, at the age of 61. Brad started writing poetry during LuAnne’s illness. He had never written poetry but found it was cathartic and helped him survive a difficult time. He continues to write poetry today. As Irish poet David Whyte said, “It is a language against which we have no defenses.”
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Third Thursdays – Voices at Larksong: Tricia Currans-Sheehan & Jeanne Emmons (Read More)
A monthly in-house reading series with new guests each month, beginning with social time at 5:30 pm followed by the reading/music from 6:00 – 7:30 pm. Guests will include writers of all genres and (frequently) musicians. Thursday, September 21 features Tricia Currans-Sheehan & Jeanne Emmons. Tricia Currans-Sheehan is Professor Emerita at Briar Cliff University and was founding editor of The Briar Cliff Review. She has published in Big Muddy, Connecticut Review, Crab Orchard Review, VQR, Fiction, Portland Review, Calyx, South Dakota Review and other journals. Her collection of stories, The Egg Lady and Other Neighbors, won The Headwaters Literary Competition, sponsored by New Rivers Press. Currans-Sheehan’s second book, The River Road: A Novel in Stories, was an Honorable Mention for the Nashville Prize. Recently, she published a YA trilogy (Scaled, Outside In and Tongues of Light) with writing partner Jeanne Emmons, under the pen name of J.T. Ashmore. Jeanne Emmons’ collections of poetry include: The Red Canoe (Finishing Line Press); The Glove of the World (winner of the Backwaters Press Reader's Choice Award); Baseball Nights and DDT (Pecan Grove Press); and Rootbound (winner of the New Rivers Press Minnesota Voices Award). Her poems have appeared in many literary journals and have won the Comstock poetry prize, the South Coast Review Poetry Award, the James Hearst Poetry Award, and the Sow's Ear poetry award. She and writing partner Tricia Currans-Sheehan have published the young adult “Deep Skin Series” under the pseudonym J.T. Ashmore.
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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.
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Third Thursdays – Voices at Larksong: Bob Ross and Steve Berry (Read More)
A monthly in-house reading series with new guests each month, beginning with social time at 5:30 pm followed by the reading/music from 6:00 - 7:30 pm. Guests will include writers of all genres and (frequently) musicians. Thursday, August 17 features fiction writer Bob Ross and poet Steve Berry. Bob Ross was born in Brown County, Nebraska, living first on a small ranch south of Long Pine, then in the village of Johnstown, then in Ainsworth. He grew up in town, working on the ranch in the summer and on weekends; he graduated, went to the University in Lincoln to study engineering, and entered the Air Force five years later. On receiving a medical retirement (suspected MS, false alarm) he returned to the University to take English courses, determined to become a writer of literary fiction. Following this questionable decision, he enrolled in the University of Arizona’s MA writing program, where he acquired a toxic mentor and fell in with feckless companions, most of whom he met while in group therapy. During the next two summers he drove to Seattle and sat in on Nelson Bentley’s summer poetry workshop. Then he returned to the family ranch south of Long Pine, to write poetry and try to salvage his scattered wits. By luck, he found a publisher in Harry Duncan, and published Solitary Confinement with Abattoir Editions. He also published In the Kingdom of Grass, a book of essays and photographs in collaboration with photographer Margaret MacKichan. Ross and Miller taught in Mission, South Dakota, then in Pocatello, Idaho, and finally settled in San Antonio, Texas, while keeping a small piece of property in Brown County. Since he quit teaching (retirement is too dignified) Ross has published Billy Above the Roofs and Karla or The Weight Liftress, two books of linked stories set mostly in the town of Turtle Lodge. He continues to write fiction and poetry and has not lost hope of becoming an accepted member of the Plains Literati. Steve Berry was raised in Onawa, Iowa, when young he did field work, and heavy construction for his father's lumberyard. He prepped at New Mexico Military Institute and competed in varsity sports in Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Texas. He attended Stanford, where he was active in debate, theater, and writers' workshops. He attended Writers Workshop in Iowa City before beginning Infantry Officers courses at Fort Benning, Georgia. He also spent a year as a student at University of Paris, Sorbonne and attended Northwestern University school of law, where he received his J.D. degree. He applied for active duty, Vietnam and attended JAG School. He served as chief defense counsel for the largest general court martial jurisdiction in Vietnam, 80,000 troops. He served temporary duty with several units, including 1st Infantry Division, 1st Cavalry Division, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, 199th Light Infantry Brigade, 5th Special Forces. He received the Bronze Star, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Palm Device, Vietnamese Medal of Honor, and other decorations. After his time in the service, he practiced with Rothblatt Law Firm in…
