News

Nebraska’s Poetry Out Loud Program

I’ve been part of Nebraska’s Poetry Out Loud program as a teaching artist, Finals emcee, and more for 12 years now. It’s a way to get high school students to teach poems to their classmates by memorizing and reciting them. There are prizes, including one student gets to represent the state at the National Poetry Out Loud Finals! It’s brought to us by the wonderful Nebraska Arts Council and here’s a video they made with a snazzy narrator (who you might recognize) telling more about it:

A Writing Prompt on Guilty Pleasures And 80s Rock

Spending a lot of time at home, I’m grateful for all those being careful out there, not just because I’m a Type 1 Diabetic but for all of us. I ran a writing prompt on guilty pleasures and 80s rock today for the Nebraska Writers Collective which is now available on their YouTube channel, so get to writing!

Closing Out National Poetry Month

We’re closing out National Poetry Month 2020 with a good amount of virtual events! The latest is this week’s Humanities at Home conversation put on by Humanities Nebraska:

Working with Western Nebraska Community College

A number of readings have, of course, been canceled this spring as we all help prevent the spread of Covid-19. So instead of reading at Western Nebraska Community College in Scottsbluff, we did it virtually with a few poems, some Q&A, and a writing prompt:

Dramatic sunset clouds over Scottsbluff National Monument

Santa Clara Magazine

My years at Santa Clara mean a great deal to me and to my writing, so I’m honored to have this article about me published in Santa Clara Magazine.

I took a class from a visiting Georgetown professor, Ed Ingebretsen, whose love of poetry was infectious. He showed me how to read poetry and love it.

And I had a poetry writing class with Ed Kleinschmidt where he told me, who’d written maybe a few dozen poems at that point, we would turn in 10 poems over the next 10 weeks. I didn’t think it was possible for me to write that much. I wrote probably 15 poems as I found myself searching for poems instead of waiting for them to find me. I’ve kept that weekly deadline ever since. For the past 29 years, good or bad, I’ve had to write a new poem by Monday night.

https://magazine.scu.edu/magazines/winter-2019/a-way-with-words/