Michael Catherwood, Twyla M. Hansen, Mike Stinson, and David Wyatt will read at 2 p.m. in the Humanities Building. Poetry Slam 53 will follow at 7 p.m. at The Max Bar and Grill.
Wayne State College's Language and Literature Department, the School of Arts and Humanities, and the WSC Press are pleased to kick off the 2026-27 Plains Writers Series on Thursday, Nov. 19, with four authors – Michael Catherwood, Twyla M. Hansen, Mike Stinson, and David Wyatt.
The readings, free and open to the public, will begin at 2 p.m. in the second-floor lounge of the Humanities Building on campus. The event will be livestreamed on the Plains Writers Series Facebook page.
Poetry Slam 53 will follow the Plains Writers Series readings. The slam will be held at the Max Bar and Grill in downtown Wayne at 7 p.m., with registration starting at 6:30 p.m. Slam participants need to bring three original poems and the $5 registration fee. All events are free and open to the public.
The Plains Writers Series is held several times a year to bring attention to the prose and poetry of Great Plains writers through reading and interacting with area audiences.
Michael Catherwood
Michael Catherwood’s awards include a Nebraska Arts Council Grant, a Pushcart Nomination, the Holt Prize for Poetry, and a finalist for the Ruth Lily Prize.
Catherwood’s books are “Dare,” “If You Turned Around Quickly,” “Projector (Stephen F. Austin Press),” and “Near Misses (WSC Press).” His poems have appeared in “Agni,” “Aethlon,” “Black Warrior Review,” “Borderlands,” “Briar Cliff Review,” “Georgetown Review,” “Hawai`i Review,” Kansas Quarterly,” “Laurel Review,” “Mangrove,” “Midwest Quarterly,” “Pittsburgh Quarterly,” “South Dakota Review,” “Sycamore Review,” “Westview,” and others.
Catherwood was an editor at The Backwaters Press and has been associate editor at “Plainsongs” since 1995. His recent poems have appeared in “I-70 Review,” “Slipstream,” “Louisiana Literature,” “The Common,” “The Misfit,” “Pennsylvania English,” and “Common Ground Review.”
Catherwood is a survivor of numerous cancers, is retired, and lives in Omaha with his wife, Cindy.
Twyla M. Hansen
Twyla M. Hansen has conducted poetry readings/discussions and creative writing workshops through Humanities Nebraska since 1993. Her previous books have won Nebraska Book Awards, WILLA Literary Awards, the High Plains Book Award, and a Nebraska 150 Distinguished Book Award. She is a Larksong Writers Place board member and was Nebraska State Poet from 2013 to 2018. Other honors include the Nebraska Literary Heritage Award and the Nebraska Center for the Book President’s Award.
Hansen collaborated on the poem-art books “Seen in Otoe County” with photographer Michael Farrell (2023), “Prairie Suite: A Celebration” with ornithologist Dr. Paul Johnsgard (2006), and “Field Trip” with international print artist Karen Kunc (2002).
Hansen’s writing has been published in “Hawk and Whippoorwill,” “Café Review,” “Briar Cliff Review,” “Oakwood,” “Prairie Schooner,” “South Dakota Review,” “More in Time: A Tribute to Ted Kooser,” “Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology 1867-2017,” and by The Academy of American Poets, The Poetry Foundation, Poetry Out Loud, and many more.
Mike Stinson
Mike Stinson, a retired psychotherapist, has engaged in various genres of writing, including an ongoing poetry feature for a small-town newspaper and a personal-interest column called Walking the Dog. He has had many poems published in a variety of journals and anthologies, as well as a collection of baseball haiku in a chapbook titled “extra innings.”
Stinson enjoys photography, writing, road trips, sports, exploring small towns, and putting on many miles of “gravel travel” while taking in marvelous Nebraska landscapes and sunsets.
David Wyatt
David Wyatt was born in Southern California a year before the end of World War II, spending his childhood and early twenties in the Golden State, an agricultural and horticultural paradise well into the Fifties. Before and after his time in the U.S. Army in the mid-Sixties, Wyatt attended San Diego State, the University of Nebraska-Omaha, and the University of Oregon, where he held a graduate teaching fellowship in creative writing. He has also lived in Illinois, Long Island (New York), and Seattle, working (and not working) various jobs.
Wyatt has been employed at UNO’s Criss Library since 1996. He was awarded a Distinguished Merit Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council in 2006 and won the inaugural Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from “The Georgia Review” in 2013. He has published poems in “ABZ,” “The Christian Science Monitor,” Prairie Schooner,” “Natural Bridge,” “The Georgia Review,” and “Poetry.”
Wyatt lives in Lincoln with his wife, Susan. “Gathering Place (2016)” and “Evening All of a Sudden (2022)” are his two prior collections with WSC Press.
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 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 www.wscpress.com.