Published Wednesday, February 21st, 2024
The event, free and open to the public, will be held in the second-floor lounge of Wayne State’s 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 next installment of the Plains Writers Series, featuring Julie S. Paschold, Kelly Weber, and Neil Harrison on Thursday, Feb. 29, at Wayne State.
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 live-streamed on the Plains Writers Series Facebook page.
Poetry Slam 48 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 www.wscpress.com.
About the Readers
Julie S. Paschold (Tansy Julie the Soaring Eagle) is a queer disabled poet and artist from Nebraska. They have their bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agronomy from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Their first book, “Horizons (Atmosphere Press),” is a collection of poetry honoring soil, one of our nonrenewable resources. Paschold has been published in several publications, including “Plainsongs,” “The Awkward Review,” “Nebraska’s Writers Guild,” “The Raven’s Perch,” “The Radical Teacher,” and several publications on medium.com. Their poem “Multitudes of Blue Arrows” was a semi-finalist in the first Kate Sommers Memorial Prize in 2023, and two of their chapbooks won honorable mention in contests by “Writer’s Digest” in 2021 and 2022.
Kelly Weber (they/she) is the author of “We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place (Tupelo Press, 2022),” and “You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis,” winner of the 2022 Omnidawn First/Second Book Prize (December 2023). Weber has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and their work has appeared in or is forthcoming in “AGNI,” “Pleiades,” “Waxwing,” “Gulf Coast Online,” Electric Literature’s “The Commuter,” “Southeast Review,” and elsewhere. Weber earned a master of fine arts degree from Colorado State University.
Neil Harrison’s poetry collections include “In a River of Wind (Bridge Burner’s, 2000),” “Into the River Canyon at Dusk (Lone Willow, 2005),” “Back in the Animal Kingdom (Pinyon Publishing, 2011),”Where the Waters Take You (Pinyon Publishing, 2018, winner of a Nebraska Center for the Book Honor Award),” and “For the Love of God (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023).” Harrison, a former teacher of English and creative writing, lives in Northeast Nebraska.
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 www.wscpress.com.