David Lee will read at 2 p.m. in the second-floor lounge of the Humanities Building.
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 2025-26 Plains Writers Series, featuring poet David Lee, on Thursday, Oct. 23.
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. For more information, visit the WSC Press website.
About David Lee
David Lee was Utah’s first poet laureate; and in 2001, he was finalist-runner up for United States Poet Laureate. He is the author of two dozen volumes of poetry, including The Porcine Canticles, My Town, So Quietly the Earth, Last Call, and Rusty Barbed Wire: Selected Poems.
A former seminary student and semi-pro baseball player (the only white player to ever play in the Texas Negro Leagues for the Post, Texas Blue Stars) and hog farmer, he has a Ph.D., with a concentration in John Milton, and taught at Southern Utah University for more than three decades where he received every teaching award given by the university, including being named Professor of the Year on three occasions.
Lee’s awards include multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Western States Book Award, Mountain and Plains States Booksellers Award, Critics Choice Award, Utah Book Awards, New York Public Library’s Poetry Book of the Year, Elkhorn Poetry Prize, Evolutionary Poem of the Year, Utah Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts, Utah Governor’s Merit Award in the Humanities and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.
The Utah Humanities Council and Utah Education Association named Lee one of the top 12 writers in Utah literary history, and he was the fifth academic in Utah higher education to be named a Lifetime Fellow by the Utah Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retired, he scribbles and wanders rural roads and byways, all at about the same rate and pace, and maintains his intense training schedule to achieve his goal of becoming a world-class piddler.
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.
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.