Featuring Dr. Stephanie A. Marcellus and Aliyah American Horse. UPDATE: Aliyah American Horse will not be able to attend this event. Instead, Bonnie Johnson-Bartee will join as a reader at the event.
Wayne State College's Language and Literature Department, the School of Arts and Humanities, and the WSC Press are pleased to host the first installment of the 2024-25 Plains Writers Series, featuring Dr. Stephanie A. Marcellus and Aliyah American Horse Bonnie Johnson-Bartee on Thursday, Nov. 21.
The reading, free and open to the public, will begin at 2 p.m. in the second-floor lounge of the Humanities Building. This event will be livestreamed on the Plains Writers Series Facebook page.
Poetry Slam 49 will follow the Plains Writers Series reading. The slam will be held at 7 p.m. at the Max Bar and Grill in downtown Wayne. Registration begins at 6:30 p.m. for slam participants who need to bring four original poems and the $5 registration fee. The slam is also free and open to the public. For more information, visit the WSC Press website.
About the Readers
Dr. Stephanie A. Marcellus is a professor of English at Wayne State. She earned her master of fine arts degree in Creative Writing from Colorado State University, and her Ph.D. in Nineteenth Century British Literature from the University of South Dakota. Her work has appeared in “Plainsongs,” “Three Drops from a Cauldron,” and “Alligator Juniper,” as well as two other chapbooks, “All That I Thought Was Light” and “What Is Left Behind: Garden Elegies.”
Bonnie Johnson-Bartee is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, Bildungsroman 38 (2004), Named, but Unknown (2006), and Cord Blood (Sandhills Press, 2023) which won the Nebraska Book Award, Poetry Honor Award. She teaches creative writing and literature courses at Wayne State College and at Northeast Community College in Norfolk where she also serves as the director of the Visiting Writers Series and is the faculty editor of the annual student magazine, Voices Out of Nowhere. Bonnie grew up in Northeast Nebraska, where she raised her children, and her children are now raising theirs. A grandmother to six, she appreciates the deep roots of her Nebraska home.
About the Plains Writers Series
The Plains Writers Series is held several times a year at Wayne State and has been an integral part of the college’s history since 1977. This reading series generally features Great Plains authors and artists in a one or two-day event that is free and open to the public. The Plains Writers Series brings attention to the prose and poetry of Great Plains writers through reading and interacting with area audiences.
The Plains Writers Series provides a forum for Nebraska’s contemporary writers and poets to share their work with Nebraska readers. The content of the project is literature, especially that of rural Nebraska. Literature will be the entire focus of the series throughout the day in the form of readings, questions and answer sessions, one-on-one conversations between the audience members, and the authors presenting their work. Following the readings, a poetry or fiction slam is held in downtown Wayne.
For more information about the Plains Writers Series, contact Chad Christensen, managing editor of the WSC Press and director of the Plains Writers Series, at [email protected] or 402-375-7118, or visit the WSC Press website.