The free monthly Nebraska Poets Reading Series highlights the talent of Nebraska poets and invites discussion with audience members. All events are free online, but registration is required to receive an event link. Registration links for each poet’s event and additional details about each poet are available on the Nebraska Poetry Society’s website. Judy Lorenzen’s poetry holds both joy and sorrow—family, forgiveness, and the quiet wonders of nature. Honest and tender, her work has been praised for the way love threads through even life’s struggles. 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.
The free monthly Nebraska Poets Reading Series highlights the talent of Nebraska poets and invites discussion with audience members. All events are free online, but registration is required to receive an event link. Registration links for each poet’s event and additional details about each poet are available on the Nebraska Poetry Society’s website. Chuck Peek is a Great Plains poet whose work is pastoral, funny, and sharp as the Nebraska wind. He captures the quirks and truths of Great Plains life with wit and warmth. 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.
The free monthly Nebraska Poets Reading Series highlights the talent of Nebraska poets and invites discussion with audience members. All events are free online, but registration is required to receive an event link. Registration links for each poet’s event and additional details about each poet are available on the Nebraska Poetry Society’s website. Todd Robinson’s work moves between tenderness and wit, exploring love, loss, and the beauty of the Midwest. His poems draw on pop culture, memory, and faith, revealing both humor and heart in the ordinary and extraordinary. Todd Robinson is the author of Mass for Shut-Ins (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) and Note at Heart Rock (Main Street Rag, 2012). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Rattle, North American Review, and Rhino. He is an Associate Professor in the Writer's Workshop at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and caregiver to his partner, a disabled physician.
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Nebraska Poets Reading Series: Kim Sosin (Read More)
The free monthly Nebraska Poets Reading Series highlights the talent of Nebraska poets and invites discussion with audience members. All events are free online, but registration is required to receive an event link. Registration links for each poet’s event and additional details about each poet are available on the Nebraska Poetry Society’s website. Kim McNealy Sosin is a retired university professor of economics who eagerly took up writing poetry and photography in retirement, making her a “new poet” in her seventies. She loves to create ekphrastic poetry using her own travel photographs. Her poems and photographs have appeared in publications including Raw Art Review, Fine Lines (poems and several cover photos), Failed Haiku, Voices from the Plains, Verses from the Plains (several poems and cover design), Landscape Photography Magazine, The Heron’s Nest, The Good Life Review (poem and cover photo), Wanderlust Journal, Ekphrastic Review, and Sandcutters. She published her first poetry chapbook, Not Quite on Grand Avenue: Poems of the Early Years, which explores the challenges and joys of growing up as a young girl in a rural town in the forties and fifties. Her second chapbook is coming out in the fall with poems by a co-author Janet Rives and Sosin’s photographs of France. Reflections of France: Images and Poems.
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Nebraska Poets Reading Series: Maria Nazos (Read More)
The free monthly Nebraska Poets Reading Series highlights the talent of Nebraska poets and invites discussion with audience members. All events are free online, but registration is required to receive an event link. Registration links for each poet’s event and additional details about each poet are available on the Nebraska Poetry Society’s website. Maria Nazos grew up in Athens, Greece, and Joliet, Illinois. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, TriQuarterly, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She’s the author of the poetry collection PULSE (Omnidawn, 2026) and the translation collection The Slow Horizon that Breathes (World Poetry Books, 2023) from the poet Dimitra Kotoula, longlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award. Maria has worked almost every job, including as a whale watch boat attendant, table dancer, teacher, barista, sunglass salesperson, bartender, and probably the worst waitress in the entire history of the Eastern seaboard. If she spilled Pinot Noir on you, she apologizes.
The free monthly Nebraska Poets Reading Series highlights the talent of Nebraska poets and invites discussion with audience members. All events are free online, but registration is required to receive an event link. Registration links for each poet’s event and additional details about each poet are available on the Nebraska Poetry Society’s website. Gene Fendt taught at UNK, where he was Albertus Magnus Professor of Philosophy, for about 40 years and was blessed to have Don Welch for a colleague through most of those decades. Besides the usual (and unusual) scholarly publications, he also wrote and published poetry in numerous journals winning several awards including Gemini magazine's open poetry competition (nominated for a Pushcart), the Princemere Poetry Prize, and two Nebraska Individual Artist Fellowships. Together with Don Welch he authored The Cranes, A Book of Hours which was written out by noted Nebraska calligrapher Arthur Pierce. His first book of poetry, Eternal Life and other poems was published by Angelico Press of Brooklyn NY in 2025.
The free monthly Nebraska Poets Reading Series highlights the talent of Nebraska poets and invites discussion with audience members. All events are free online, but registration is required to receive an event link. Registration links for each poet’s event and additional details about each poet are available on the Nebraska Poetry Society’s website. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke came of age working in fields, factories, and waters. A labor and environmental poet, Hedge Coke was a sharecropper by the time she was mid-teens and continued manual labor until retraining for former fieldworkers nearing thirty years of age, after disabilities precluded continuation. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke teaches for UC Riverside, and is the author/editor of 18 books, including Look at This Blue, Burn, Streaming, Blood Run, Off-Season City Pipe, Dog Road Woman, The Year of the Rat, Effigies I, II, & III, Ahani, and Sing.
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Nebraska Poets Reading Series: Charles Fort (Read More)
The free monthly Nebraska Poets Reading Series highlights the talent of Nebraska poets and invites discussion with audience members. All events are free online, but registration is required to receive an event link. Registration links for each poet’s event and additional details about each poet are available on the Nebraska Poetry Society’s website. Charles Fort is the author of eight books of poetry and ten chapbooks including: The Town Clock Burning (St. Andrews Press)--We Did Not Fear the Father (Red Hen Press)--Darvil, Prose Poems Book 1 (St. Andrews Press)—We Did Not Fear the Father (Carnegie Mellon University Press, reprint, Contemporary Classic)--Frankenstein was a Negro, Prose Poems Book 2 (Backwaters Press)-- Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz, Book 3 (Backwaters Press) and appears in 43 anthologies and The Best American Poetry, 2001, 2003, and 2016. Fort is Emeritus Distinguished Endowed Professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and Founder of the Wendy Fort Foundation Theater of Fine Arts.
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Nebraska Poets Reading Series: Mary K. Stillwell (Read More)
The free monthly Nebraska Poets Reading Series highlights the talent of Nebraska poets and invites discussion with audience members. All events are free online, but registration is required to receive an event link. Registration links for each poet’s event and additional details about each poet are available on the Nebraska Poetry Society’s website. Mary K. Stillwell has studied with William Packard and Erica Jong in New York and Ted Kooser and Hilda Raz on the plains. She earned her PhD in plains literature from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her poems and criticism has appeared in The Paris Review, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Midwest Quarterly, South Dakota Review, The New York Quarterly, Midwest Quarterly, Book of Re-reading of Recent American Poetry II, Women’s Studies, More in Time, and numerous anthologies. Most recently, her poem, “Open Door, Green and Pine,” was published in the spring 2023 issue of Prairie Schooner.
The free monthly Nebraska Poets Reading Series highlights the talent of Nebraska poets and invites discussion with audience members. All events are free online, but registration is required to receive an event link. Registration links for each poet’s event and additional details about each poet are available on the Nebraska Poetry Society’s website. Jewel Rodgers is an interdisciplinary spoken word poet, performer, and visual artist from North Omaha, Nebraska. She is the 2025-2029 Nebraska State Poet, a 2023 Union for Contemporary Art Fellow and Populus Fund Grantee, and a 2022-2023 Omaha Entertainment & Arts Awards nominee for Best Performance Poet in Omaha. Alongside her artistic practice, she creates and maintains privately-held community amenities for public use while working professionally in commercial real estate.
