Fans of true crime will not want to miss author Debora Harding's talk about Dancing with the Octopus, a memoir detailing her 1978 abduction at the age of fourteen. This title is the 2024 One Book One Nebraska selection. Harding's book also describes meeting her attacker as she processed her traumatic adolescent experience in adulthood. Registration is required to receive an event link. Debora Harding spent her childhood in the midwest prairie states of Nebraska and Iowa. At the age of nineteen she dropped out of university to work for Senator Gary Hart’s presidential campaign, before relocating to Washington DC to run an environmental non-profit. Fed up with politics, she cycled across America where she met her English husband, author Thomas Harding. She then joined him in the UK and worked at an award-winning video production company that focused on the counter-culture protest movement in Europe. Later, she co-founded the UK’s first local television station in Oxford and gave birth to two children, Kadian and Sam. She is now a full-time writer and activist and splits her time between the United States and England.
The National Willa Cather Center is hosting an author series as a way to connect Cather to contemporary writers as well as provide an accessible and inclusive space where readers can talk directly with writers about their work. Participating authors discuss how they create their work, thematic connections within and outside of their texts, and and how our shared experiences inform the work. This virtual event is free, but registration is required. Click here for more information and to register. Acclaimed mystery novelist Alex Kava will be on hand to talk about her impressive career as a Nebraska author who writes in the tradition of other Nebraska mystery novelists such as the late Mignon Eberhardt. Mystery of Hunting's End, Eberhart's 1930 book set in the Nebraska Sand Hills is the 2023 One Book One Nebraska selection. Kava's most recent novel in her Ryder Creed series, Fallen Creed, will also be highlighted during this talk. In her 2022 novel, Ryder Creed and his scent dog, Grace, return to Nebraska to solve a gruesome crime discovered by a rural Postal carrier. Alex Kava is the New York Times, USA Today and Amazon bestselling author of twenty-one novels that include the critically acclaimed series featuring K9 handler Ryder Creed and the international bestselling series with FBI profiler Maggie O’Dell. She’s been awarded two Nebraska Book Awards, a Florida Book Award and the Mari Sandoz Award.
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Virtual Author Series: David McKay Powell (Read More)
The National Willa Cather Center is hosting an author series as a way to connect Cather to contemporary writers as well as provide an accessible and inclusive space where readers can talk directly with writers about their work. Participating authors discuss how they create their work, thematic connections within and outside of their texts, and and how our shared experiences inform the work. This virtual event is free, but registration is required. Click here for more information and to register. Throughout her fiction, Willa Cather mentioned forty-seven operas. References to opera appear in all but three of her twelve novels and in roughly half of her short stories. Despite a dearth of musical education, Cather produced astute writing about the genre beginning in her earliest criticism and continuing throughout her career. She counted opera stars among her close friends, and according to Edith Lewis, her companion throughout adulthood, the two women frequently visited the theater, even in the early days, when purchasing tickets to attend performances proved a financial sacrifice. Melding cultural history with thoughtful readings of her works and discussions of opera’s complex place in turn-of-the-century America, David McKay Powell’s Cather and Opera offers the first book-length study of what drew the writer so powerfully and repeatedly to the art form. David McKay Powell is associate professor of English at Union College in Barbourville, Kentucky, where his research focuses on the intersections of classical music and American literature.
The National Willa Cather Center is hosting an author series as a way to connect Cather to contemporary writers as well as provide an accessible and inclusive space where readers can talk directly with writers about their work. Participating authors discuss how they create their work, thematic connections within and outside of their texts, and and how our shared experiences inform the work. This virtual event is free, but registration is required. Click here for more information and to register. Tracy Daugherty will discuss his book 148 Charles Street. This novel explores the friendship between Willa Cather and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. Two different writers with distinct styles. Cather was the novelist while Sergeant was the muckraking journalist. Their friendship becomes tested after Cather fictionalizes a war that Sergeant covered. This is a story of how friendship endures through disagreements and misunderstandings.
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Virtual Author Series: Sarah Fawn Montgomery and Suzanne Ohlmann (Read More)
The National Willa Cather Center is hosting an author series as a way to connect Cather to contemporary writers as well as provide an accessible and inclusive space where readers can talk directly with writers about their work. Participating authors discuss how they create their work, thematic connections within and outside of their texts, and and how our shared experiences inform the work. This virtual event is free, but registration is required. Click here for more information and to register. Sarah Fawn Montgomery and Suzanne Ohlmann, two writers with Nebraska roots who explore the world in order to learn more about their place in it, will be part of an engaging conversation about Nebraska memoir. If you are interested in the same "human stories" Willa Cather illuminated in her own work, you will enjoy this free author series event! Blending lyric memoir with lamenting cultural critique, Montgomery's book Halfway from Home examines contemporary longing and desire, sorrow and ache, searching for how to build a home when human connection is disappearing, and how to live meaningfully when our sense of self is uncertain in a fractured world. Taking readers from the tide pools and monarch groves of California, to the fossil beds and grass prairies of Nebraska, to the scrimshaw shops and tangled forests of Massachusetts, Montgomery holds a mirror up to America and asks us to reflect on our past before we run out of time to save our future. Halfway from Home grieves a vanishing world while offering—amidst emotional and environmental collapse—ways to discover hope, healing, and home. In Shadow Migration: Mapping a Life, Ohlmann launches the reader into flight over miles and decades of migration: from an apple-pie childhood in America's Fourth of July City to the dirt floors of a cowshed in rural India, we zigzag across time and geography to see the world through Ohlmann's eyes. Through incarnations as a musician, arts manager, and registered nurse, Ohlmann finally lands in Texas, buys a house, and gets a dog. But her house is haunted, and so is she. With honesty, compassion, and a sense of humor, Ohlmann recounts her tenacious search into the shadows of her life.
The National Willa Cather Center is hosting an author series as a way to connect Cather to contemporary writers as well as provide an accessible and inclusive space where readers can talk directly with writers about their work. Participating authors discuss how they create their work, thematic connections within and outside of their texts, and and how our shared experiences inform the work. This virtual event is free, but registration is required. Click here to register. Poet Jamaica Baldwin will be on hand for a special poetry reading and discussion in anticipation of "Bone Language", her brand new collection of poems. Jamaica (she/her) is a poet and educator originally from Santa Cruz, CA. Her first book, Bone Language, will be published by YesYes Books in April 2023. Her work has appeared in Guernica, World Literature Today, The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and The Missouri Review, among others. Her accolades include a 2023 Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a RHINO Poetry editor's prize, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and the San Miguel de Allende Writer's Conference Contest Poetry Award. Jamaica has also served as a community based teaching artist with Writers in the Schools - Seattle, Louder Than a Bomb - Great Plains, an affiliate of Nebraska Writers Collective, and taught a generative writing workshop for women in Guatemala. Her writing has been supported by Aspen Words, Storyknife, Hedgebrook, Furious Flower, and the Jack Straw Writers program. Jamaica is currently the associate editor of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska -Lincoln where she is pursuing her PhD in English with a focus on poetry and Women's and Gender Studies.
The National Willa Cather Center is hosting an author series as a way to connect Cather to contemporary writers as well as provide an accessible and inclusive space where readers can talk directly with writers about their work. Participating authors discuss how they create their work, thematic connections within and outside of their texts, and and how our shared experiences inform the work. This virtual event is free, but registration is required. Click here to register. "Boys and Oil: Growing up gay in a fractured land" is Taylor Brorby's account of his childhood and adolescence in Center, North Dakota, interwoven with historic coal-country vignettes. Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing up gay in a fractured land, Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, the MacDowell Colony, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Mesa Refuge, Blue Mountain Center, and the North Dakota Humanities Council. Taylor’s work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Orion Magazine, The Arkansas International, Southern Humanities Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and has appeared in numerous anthologies. He is a contributing editor at North American Review and serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press. He is the Annie Tanner Clark Fellow in Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah.
The National Willa Cather Center is hosting an author series as a way to connect Cather to contemporary writers as well as provide an accessible and inclusive space where readers can talk directly with writers about their work. Participating authors discuss how they create their work, thematic connections within and outside of their texts, and and how our shared experiences inform the work. This virtual event is free, but registration is required. Click here to register. In "Private Way," set in 2015, protagonist Vivi Marx winds up off the grid in Nebraska in order to escape professional and personal turmoil, and as a result seeks solace from Willa Cather's novels. Ladette Randolph is the author of five books: three novels: Private Way, Haven’s Wake and A Sandhills Ballad, a short story collection, This is Not the Tropics, and a memoir, Leaving the Pink House. The recipient of four Nebraska Book Awards, a Rona Jaffe grant, a Pushcart Prize, a Virginia Faulkner award, and a citation from Best New American Voices, she is editor-in-chief of the literary journal Ploughshares at Emerson College and co-owner of the manuscript consulting firm Randolph Lundine. A long-time Nebraskan, she spent her childhood in the same part of west-central Nebraska where her family lived for five generations. She now lives in Boston with her husband Noel.
The National Willa Cather Center is hosting an author series as a way to connect Cather to contemporary writers as well as provide an accessible and inclusive space where readers can talk directly with writers about their work. Participating authors discuss how they create their work, thematic connections within and outside of their texts, and and how our shared experiences inform the work. This virtual event is free, but registration is required. Click here to register. Oscar Hokeah's "Calling for a Blanket Dance" tells the story of Ever Geimausaddle and his struggle to carve a place for himself in an increasingly precarious community. Hokeah's debut novel has been described as a "stunning" example of "honest storytelling," and it has been longlisted for the prestigious Carnegie Medal. Oscar Hokeah is a regionalist Native American writer of literary fiction, interested in capturing intertribal, transnational, and multicultural aspects within two tribally specific communities: Tahlequah and Lawton, Oklahoma. He was raised inside these tribal circles and continues to reside there today. He is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma from his mother (Hokeah and Stopp families), and he has Mexican heritage from his father (Chavez family) who emigrated from Aldama, Chihuahua, Mexico. Oscar Hokeah holds an M.A. in English from the University of Oklahoma, and a B.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). He is a recipient of the Truman Capote Scholarship Award through IAIA, and also a winner of the Native Writer Award through the Taos Summer Writers Conference. Hokeah has written for Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, World Literature Today, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.
