The Fall Reading Series Returns
Four guest authors share their work, insights and much more this season.
- published: 2021/08/30
Visit the Writer's Workshop's Creative Writing program in the School of the Arts HERE and learn how you can begin to write your story.
Saddiq Dzukogi | Poetry | Wednesday | September 8 | 7:30 pm
Criss Library
Saddiq Dzukogi’s poetry collection Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press 2021) was named one of 29 of the best poetry collections by Oprah Daily. His chapbook Inside the Flower Room was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for APBF New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Society of America, Prairie Schooner, and other literary journals and magazines. He was a finalist of Brunel International African Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships and Grants from Nebraska Arts Council, Pen America, Obsidian Foundation, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he is a P.h.D student and serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor for Prairie Schooner.
Reginald Dwayne Betts | Creative Non Fiction | Wednesday | Oct 6 | 7:30 pm
Registered Remote Event
Reginald Dwayne Betts is an American poet, memoirist, and teacher. He has written three collections of poetry, Bastards of the Reagan Era, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, and his most recent collection Felon, which interrogates and challenges our notions of justice.
His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, is the story of a young man confined in the worst prisons in the state of Virginia, where solitary confinement, horrific conditions, and the constant violence threatened to break his humanity. Instead, Betts used the time to turn himself into a poet, a scholar, and an advocate for the reform of the criminal justice system.
Named a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2018 NEA Fellow, Betts’ writing has generated national attention and earned him a Soros Justice Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Ruth Lily Fellowship, an NAACP Image Award, and New America Fellowship. Betts has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post, as well as being interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air, The Travis Smiley Show and several other national shows. He holds a B.A. from the University of Maryland; an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College, where he was a Holden Fellow; and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He is a Ph. D. in Law candidate at Yale and, as a Liman Fellow, he spent a year representing clients in the New Haven Public Defender’s Office.
Jaye Viner | Fiction | Wednesday | November 3 | 7:30 pm
UNO Art Gallery in the Weber Fine Arts Building
Jaye Viner lives on what used to be the plains of eastern Nebraska with two feline fur bombs and a very tall man. She knows just enough about a wide variety of things to embarrass herself at parties she never attends. She holds an MFA and MA from the University of Nebraska. Her writing has been published in Drabblecast, The Roanoke Review, and Everyday Fiction. Her first novel, Jane of Battery Park, is now available from Red Hen Press. Find her on Twitter @JayeViner or Instagram @Jaye_Viner
Kristin Burke | Screenwriting | Wednesday | December 1 | 7:30 pm
Registered Remote Event
Kristin Burke is a Writer, Director, and Costume Designer educated at Northwestern University. She was recently awarded a fellowship in the Warner Brothers Emerging Film Directors’ Workshop, where she was given $100,000 to write and direct the short film Urban Myth: Nest, now available to view on HBOGo.
Burke has written several feature film scripts, and has four projects in active development to direct. She is also in post on a short documentary called This is Why We Walk, chronicling the eighty-mile journey of Marita Growing Thunder, a Montana teenager fighting to raise awareness for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis. Burke has designed costumes for over fifty feature films and television series, including seasons one and two of Sleepy Hollow 2, the feature films The Conjuring, Insidious, Running Scared, The Cooler, and The Slaughter Rule. In addition, Ms. Burke is an internationally exhibited artist, specializing in collage, quilting and mail art, and had her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in 2001. Burke also founded the nonprofit SECOND FAMILIES to assist newly arrived refugees in Southern California. Currently working with over 150 families, the organization provides basic non-food items like clothing, personal care items, and furniture to families who have arrived in this country with nothing.