Visiting Faculty

Shanan Ballam teaches poetry writing and fiction writing at Utah State University and was named the 2014 Lecturer of the Year for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. She is the author of the chapbook The Red Riding Hood Papers (Finishing Line Press 2010) and the full-length poetry collection Pretty Marrow (Negative Capability Press 2013) which was a semi-finalist for the 2010 Brittingham and Polk Poetry Prizes, the 2010 May Swenson Award, the 2010 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, and the 2012 Louise Bogan Award; in 2012 it received first place in the Utah Arts Council’s Original Writing Contest, judged by Sue Walker, Poet Laureate of Alabama. Ballam’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Pilgrimage, Crab Orchard Review, American Poetry Journal, Sugar House Review, 15 Bytes: Utah’s Art Magazine, Whistling Shade, Spoon River Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Tar River Poetry, and South Dakota Review. Shanan earned an MFA in Writing from the University of Nebraska Omaha. In 2013, she was appointed to the Utah Arts Council Board of Directors where she serves as the Literary Arts Representative.

Joy Castro is the author of the literary thriller Hell or High Water (St. Martin’s, 2012) and the memoirs The Truth Book (Arcade, 2005) and Island of Bones(University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming 2012). Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, North American Review, Seneca Review, and The New York Times Magazine. She is an associate professor and the associate director of the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches literature, creative writing, and Latino studies. www.joycastro.com.

Rachel Cohn

Rachel Cohn is the author of numerous award-winning young adult novels, including the Betas series, Gingerbread, You Know Where to Find Me, and, with David Levithan, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist and Dash & Lily's Book of Dares. She lives in Los Angeles and she can be found on the web at www.rachelcohn.com.

Lisa Fay Coutley

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of Errata (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, In the Carnival of Breathing (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, and Back-Talk (Articles Press, 2010), winner of the Rooms Chapbook Contest. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, scholarships to the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, and an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize. Her prose and poetry have been anthologized and published widely in publications such as Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Verse Daily, Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Crazyhorse, and Poets & Writers.

Mark E. Cull

Mark E. Cull is the author of the short story collection One Way Donkey Ride (Asylum Arts) and a novel King of the Sea Monkeys (forthcoming Guernica Editions) and has co-edited three short storyanthologies; Anyone is Possible, Blue Cathedral and The Crucifix is Down. He is Publisher of Red Hen Press, which he founded in 1994 with Kate Gale. During the time Red Hen Press has become one of the leading independent literary presses in North America, he has designed and produced more than twenty volumes of literary fiction and poetry a year. He also serves on the board of WriteGirl a Los Angeles-based organization that promotes creativity and self-expression to empower girls.

Cat Dixon is the author of Our End Has Brought the Spring (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and Too Heavy to Carry (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2014). She is the marketing director and board secretary of The Backwaters Press, a nonprofit press in Omaha. Dixon earned her MFA in Writing from the University of Nebraska Omaha. In addition to teaching in UNO’s undergraduate creative writing program part-time, she works full-time as a church administrator. Her poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies including Sugar House Review, Midwest Quarterly Review, Coe Review, Eclectica, Trinity Review, Calliope Magazine, Thin Air Magazine, and Mid-American Review. Her website is www.catdix.com.

Gary Dop — poet, performer, playwright, and professor — grew up throughout Germany and the United States, and he now lives with his wife and three daughters in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where he is an English professor at Randolph College. He holds an MFA in Writing from the University of Nebraska Omaha. Dop's writing has appeared in dozens of national and international journals, including Prairie Schooner, Sugar House Review, New Letters, Rattle, Agni, The Florida Review, Midwestern Gothic, Ocean State Review, Eclectica, Oxford Magazine, Poetry City USA Anthology, Midwest Quarterly, PANK, South Dakota Review, and Blackbird. In addition to writing for the page, Dop dabbles in playwriting, acting, screenwriting, comedy, and radio. Dop's essays have been heard on public radio's All Things Considered; he has written, consulted for, directed, and sold scripts for video and film projects (including commercials, short films, documentaries, features); and his plays have been produced in small venues around the country. In 2013, Dop was awarded the Great Plains Emerging Writer Prize, and in 2015, his first book of poems, Father, Child, Water, was published by Red Hen Press. www.garydop.com

Shelley Evans

Shelley Evans has written teleplays for ABC, CBS, Showtime, USA Network and Lifetime Television. Her produced scripts have starred, among others,Anne Heche, Sam Shepard,Josh Brolin, James Caan, Jacqueline Bisset, Candice Bergen and Mercedes Ruehl. She received her BA from Wesleyan University, and an MFA from New York University, where she was awarded the Graduate Prize in Dramatic Writing. A member of the Writer's Guild of America, she lives, writes and teaches writing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. www.shelleyevans.com

Charles Fort

Charles Fort's books include: We Did 
Not Fear The Father: New and Selected Poems by Red Hen Press (2010) and Mrs.
 Belladonna's Supper Club Waltz, New and Selected Prose Poems, Volumes 1 
and 2, by Backwaters Press(2010), with 
elements of poetry, fiction, creative 
non-fiction, and memoir. Fort's poems have appeared in The Best American 
Poetry 2003, The Best American 
Poetry 2000, Best of Prose Poem International, The American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, The Carnegie Mellon Anthology of Poetry, and other places, including twenty-one anthologies. Carnegie Mellon University
 Press reprinted his first book, The 
Town Clock Burning, under its Classic
 Contemporary Series. His other books include Darvil, St. Andrews Press, and Frankenstein Was A Negro,Loganhouse Press. A MacDowell Fellow, Fort attended the Breadloaf Writers' Conference in 1972 and 1974, and the Cranbrook Writers' Conference in 1971, 1972, and 1973. He holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University, and he has taught on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including at UNO MFA in Writing, Creative Writing in Poetry and Fiction, Harlem Renaissance, Twentieth Century British and American Literature, Contemporary Poetics, and Seminar in Prosody. He is also the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Writer's Voice: Open Poetry Award, the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize, and The Mary Carolyn Davis Memorial Award. Fort held the Paul W and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Chair in Poetry at the University of Nebraska at Kearney (1997-2007). www.charlesfortpoet.com

Gabriel Fried is the longtime poetry editor at Persea Books, a literary publishing house founded in1975 and based in New York City. He is the author of Making the New Lamb Take, a collection of poems, and his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, The Paris Review, and other journals and magazines. He also teaches courses on creative writing, publishing, and baseball at the University of Missouri (Columbia).

D. Scott Glasser

D. Scott Glasser teaches directing, acting, voice, theory, film and Shakespeare at the Nebraska at Omaha Department of Theatre. Scott has been a director, playwright, actor, dramaturg and teacher at such theatres as the Guthrie Theatre, GeVa Repertory (Rochester), Opera Institute (Boston), ACT (Seattle), Chanhassen Dinner Theatre, Children's Theater Company (Minneapolis), Skylight Opera Theatre, Madison and Minnesota Operas, Utah and Nebraska Shakespeare Festivals and many others. He recently directed A Walk in the Woods and At The Vanishing Point for the Great Plains Theatre Conference. Scott received an MFA in Acting from Cornell University, helped create Willamette University’s theater program, co-founded the Dakota Theatre Caravan, was a resident actor/director at the St. Paul Actors Theatre, produced and performed at the Edinburgh International Fringe, was Artistic Director of Madison Repertory Theatre from 1993 to 2002, and is a longstanding member of Actors Equity and the Stage Directors & Choreographers unions. He has directed over 160 plays, operas and musicals, including his translation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and adaptations of Much Ado About Nothing, and Aristophanes’ The Birds, as well as premieres of plays by Lee Blessing, Jon Klein, Martha Boesing, and Steven Dietz. He has assisted playwrights in the development of many works, including David Feldshuh’s Miss Ever’s Boys. He was also involved in 10 years of workshops and performances of developing plays At The Playwright’s Center and the Midwest Playlabs. He has edited and shaped over 30 productions of Shakespeare’s plays. Recent productions have toured to an international theatre festival in Siauliai, Lithuania, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and the Newseum in Washington DC.

Twyla M. Hansen

Twyla M. Hansen is Nebraska’s State Poet, and co-director of the website Poetry from the Plains: A Nebraska Perspective (poetryfromtheplains.org). Her newest book is Rock • Tree • Bird (Backwaters Press 2017). Her book Potato Soup is included in the list of 150 Notable Nebraska Books (nebraska150books.org). Her writing has been published in Broadkill Review, Midwest Quarterly, Organization & Environment, Prairie Fire Newspaper, Prairie Schooner, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, National Treasures of the Great Plains: An Ecological Perspective, Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology, 1867–2017, Poetry Out Loud Anthology, film-illustrated by NET Nebraska, read on the Writers Almanac, and many others.

Christina Ham

Christina Ham's plays have been developed both nationally and internationally with the Kennedy Center, Center Theater Group, The Goodman Theater, The Guthrie Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Penumbra Theatre, Off-Broadway at the SPF Summer Play Festival, SteppingStone Theatre, and the Tokyo International Arts Festival among others. Christina is a two-time recipient of a McKnight Advancement Fellowship and a Jerome Fellowship from the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, the Marianne Murphy Women & Philanthropy Award in Playwriting, and a 2006 MacDowell Colony Residency. She is a two-time nominee for the Cherry Lane Theatre Mentorship Program, a nominee for the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, and was nominated for the Center Theater Group's Richard E. Sherwood Award for Distinguished Emerging Theater Artist. She has received commissions from The Guthrie Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and REDEYE Theatre among others. Her feature-length screenplay Booker was a finalist for Tribeca Film Institute's All Access program. Her plays are published by Dramatic Publishing, Heinemann, PlayScripts, Inc., and Smith and Kraus. A graduate of the University of Southern California and a MFA in Playwriting from The UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, Christina is an Affiliated Writer of the Playwrights' Center, a member playwright of the Workhaus Collective, and The Dramatists Guild of America. www.christinaham.com

Luke Hawley

Fiction writer and singer-songwriter Luke Hawley is an Associate Professor of English at Dordt College. His collection of short stories and accompanying songs, The Northwoods Hymnal, recently received a Nebraska Book Award. His short stories have also appeared in journals such as The Blotter, Sleet Magazine, Sparrow, Hobart, and Oeuvre Magazine. Hawley earned his MFA in Writing from the University of Nebraska Omaha. He lives in rural Iowa with his wife and two children. When not writing, teaching, or recording, he spends his time building bookcases out of old windows and learning from his agrarian neighbors about hogs and soybeans and how to change head gaskets on his Subaru. lhawley.com

Patricia Henley

Novelist and short story writer Patricia Henley has taught for over 18 years in the MFA Program at Purdue University. She is the author of three collections of short stories: Friday Night at Silver Star, winner of the 1985 Montana First Book Award; The Secret of Cartwheels; and Worship of the Common Heart, New and Selected Stories. Her first novel, Hummingbird House, was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award and The New Yorker Fiction Prize. Her second novel, In the River Sweet, was published by Pantheon in 2002. A Polish translation of In the River Sweetwas published in Warsaw in the fall of 2006. Her stories have appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, and The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has given readings, lectures, and conducted workshops in many venues nationwide, including mentoring in the UNO MFA in Writing Program.

Andrew Hinderaker

Andrew Hinderaker is a Resident Playwright of Chicago Dramatists, an ensemble member of the Gift Theatre in Chicago, and a three-time Jeff Award nominee. His plays include Suicide, Incorporated, which premiered at the Gift in 2010, was subsequently produced Off-Broadway at the Roundabout Theatre, and has since received several productions across the country. Hinderaker’s newest play, Colossal, about a star football player who suffers a catastrophic spinal injury, was the recent recipient of multiple awards from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The play, which features a twenty-person ensemble, a dance company, and a drum line, will receive a Rolling World Premiere in 2014-2015, starting at the Olney Theatre Center outside Washington, D.C. Additional plays by Hinderaker, including Dirty, Kingsville, and I Am Going to Change the World, have been produced/developed by Manhattan Theatre Club, Steppenwolf Theatre, the Araca Group, Mixed Blood Theatre, No Rules Theatre Company, Victory Gardens, Rattlestick Theatre, Stage Left Theatre, and several others. Hinderaker currently holds commissions from the Roundabout Theatre and Marc Platt Productions, and recently completed his M.F.A. in Playwriting from the University of Texas at Austin. www.andrewsplays.com

James Jay has worked as a bartender, a wild land firefighter, book seller, furniture mover, and was the Executive Director of the Northern Arizona Book Festival for four years. In 1998 he completed a MFAin Creative Writing at The University of Montana. He has taught poetry at the jail, the public schools, and Northern Arizona University. His recent poems and essays have appeared in Strange Machine, The Huffington Post, Crab Creek Review, and Nerve Bundle Review. His poetry was selected for the New Poets of the AmericanWest anthology, and he has had a poem, essay, or story appear in a newspaper, magazine or journal every month for the last four years. He won the Viola Award in Literature in 2011. His latest collection of poems, The Journeymen, was nominated for a PEN Western States Award and a Before Columbus Foundation Award. He owns Uptown Billiards, with his wife, the musician Alyson Jay, and they have two sons, Wilson and Skinny Henry. www. jamesjay.org

Liz Kay is a founding editor of Spark Wheel Press and the journal burntdistrict. Kay holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska Omaha where she was the recipient of both an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Wendy Fort Foundation Prize for exemplary work in poetry. In 2008, she was awarded a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for excellence in lyric poetry. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Nimrod, Willow Springs, The New York Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, Redactions, and Sugar House Review. Her chapbook, Something to Help Me Sleep, was published by dancing girl press in 2012, and her debut novel, Monsters: A Love Story, was published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in June 2016. lizkay.net

Jody Keisner writes and teaches in Omaha, Nebraska—smack dab in the heart of America. Her creative nonfiction and scholarly work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Brevity, Hunger Mountain, Brain,Child: the magazine for thinking mothers, So To Speak: A feminist journal of language and art, Literary Mama, New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Women’s Studies, and elsewhere. She is at work on a memoir-in-essays that explores that physical and psychological landscapes of fear as they relate to women.

Tammie M. Kennedy is an associate professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha. She teaches courses in creative nonfiction, memory studies, writing theory and pedagogy, film, rhetoric, and women's and gender studies. She is a coeditor of Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education. Her essays have appeared in Brevity, Emry's Journal, Composition Studies, Feminist Formations, Rhetoric Review, JAC, the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, the English Journal, the Journal ofLesbian Studies, and in numerous books.

Greg Kosmicki is a poet and social worker living in Omaha, Nebraska. He founded The Backwaters Press in 1997 which he edits and publishes. Books from The Backwaters Press have won more than 10 Nebraska book awards for poetry, anthology, and book and cover design. The Backwaters Prize winner selected by Philip Levine for 2004, No Accident by Aaron Anstett, won The Nebraska Book Award for Poetry, the Balcones Award from Austin Community College for the best book of poetry published by a small press in the US that year, and was a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards. Greg’s own poetry has been published in numerous magazines, both print and online, including Chiron Review, Connecticut Review, Cortland Review, New Letters, Nimrod, Paris Review, andPoetry East. He received artist’s fellowships for his poetry from the Nebraska Arts Council 2000 and 2006. He is the author of three books and 8 chapbooks of poems. Two of the poems from his book from Word Press, Some Hero of the Past,and one poem from his newest chapbook from Pudding House Publications, New Route in the Dream, have been selected by Garrison Keillor and read by him on The Writer's Almanac. Marigolds, his seventh chapbook of poems, was recently published by Black Star Press. thebackwaterspress.com

With an Academy of American Poets Prize and a Nebraska Book Award for her first full-length collection Cradling Monsoons, Sarah McKinstry-Brown has garnered a wide audience for her work. An Editorial Board member for Spark Wheel Press and a co-editor of the award-winning, The Untidy Season An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets, she has been published in journals such as South Dakota Review, Ruminate, Cimarron Review, Chicago Quarterly, and anthologies in which she’s had the pleasure of seeing her work alongside Poet Laureates Billy Collins and Ted Kooser. A working writer for close to 17 years, Sarah holds an MFA in Writing from the Univeristy of Nebraska Omaha and has taught and read in colleges, universities, libraries, coffee houses, galleries, lockdown facilities, and assisted living facilities across the Midwest, the Southwest, and beyond. In addition, she’s worked on a large number of public art projects (most recently, Conversations on a Bus) and partnered with a public non-profit cultural organization, KANEKO, to create feedback, a one-of-a-kind reading series that invites established and emerging writers to read from works in progress and get feedback on those new works. sarah.midverse.com

John T. Price

John T. Price is the author of the memoirs Daddy Long Legs: The Natural Education of a Father (Trumpeter Books/ Shambhala Press, 2013); Man Killed by Pheasant and Other Kinships (Da Capo Press, 2008; paperback released by University of Iowa Press, Spring, 2012) and Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands (University of Nebraska Press, 2004). He is the editor of the nature anthology The Tallgrass Prairie Reader(University of Iowa Press, 2014). Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1966, he attended the University of Iowa, where he earned his B.A. in Religion, M.F.A. in Nonfiction Writing and Ph.D. in English. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and other recognitions, his nonfiction writing about nature, family, and spirit has appeared in many journals, magazines, newspapers, and anthologies including Orion, The Christian Science Monitor, Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, and Best Spiritual Writing 2000. A former mentor in the UNO MFA in Writing program, he is currently a Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he directs the nonfiction writing program. He lives with his wife, Stephanie, and three sons in the Loess Hills of western Iowa. www.johntprice.com

Richard Robbins

Richard Robbins’ collections of poetry include London Underground: Poems, Radioactive City, Famous Persons We Have Known: Poems, The Invisible Wedding, and Other Americas. Over the years, he has received various awards and fellowships for his work, including those from The Loft Literary Center, the McKnight Foundation, The Minnesota State Arts Board, The Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Poetry Society of America. His poems have appeared in numerous periodicals, including CrazyHorse, Field, The Nation, The North American Review, Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, The Seattle Review, and Stand, as well as in over 20 anthologies, including A New Geography of Poets, The Decade Dance, As Far as I Can See: Contemporary Writing of the Middle Plains, Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, Where We Are: The Montana Poets Anthology, and Rain in the Forest, Light in the Trees: Contemporary Poetry from the Northwest. A founding mentor of the UNO in MFA in Writing Program, he currently directs the creative writing program Minnesota State University, Mankato. Robbins is a graduate of the University of Montana MFA program, where he studied under mentors Richard Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and Tess Gallagher.

Ned Stuckey-French

Ned Stuckey-French is the author of The American Essay in the American Century (Missouri, 2011), co-editor (with Carl Klaus) of Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time (Iowa, 2012), co-author(with Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French) of Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (Longman, 8th ed.), and book review editor of Fourth Genre. His articles and essays have appeared in journals and magazines such as In These Times, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, The Normal School, Tri-Quarterly, Walking Magazine, culturefront, Pinch, Guernica, middlebrow, and American Literature, and have been listed four times among the notable essays of the year in Best American Essays. For much of the 1970s and 1980s he worked as a union and community organizer in Boston, and during 2012 he helped organize the successful campaign to save the University of Missouri Press.

Born in Mexico City and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Natalia Treviño was raised in Spanish by her parents while Bert and Ernie gave her English lessons on the side. Natalia is an Associate Professor of English at Northwest Vista College and a member of the Macondo Foundation, a writer’s workshop aimed at encouraging non-violent social change. She holds a BA and MA in English from The University of Texas at San Antonio and an MFA in Writing from the University of Nebraska Omaha (Winter, 2010). Her poetry has won the Alfredo Moral de Cisneros Award for Emerging Writers from Sandra Cisneros, the Wendy Barker Creative Writing Award, the 2008 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and the 2012 San Antonio Artists Foundation Literary Award. Natalia’s fiction has appeared in Curbstone Press’s Mirrors Beneath the Earth and The Platte Valley Review. Nonfiction essays are included in the Wising Up Anthologies, Shifting Balance Sheets: Women’s Stories of Naturalized Citizens and Complex Allegiances: Constellations of Immigration. Natalia's poems appear in several publications including Bordersenses, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, The Houston Literary Review, Sugar House Review, Sliver of Stone, burntdistric, Voices de la Luna, and North Texas State’s Inheritance of Light. Her first book of poetry, Lavando La Dirty Laundry was published by Mongrel Empire (2013). She is currently finishing her novel, La Cruzada. Often working in community programs to increase young adult literacy, she has taught classes at women’s and children’s shelters as well as teen detention centers. Having experienced a bi-national and bicultural life, she hopes to raise understanding between people divided by arbitrary borders. She lives with her husband Stewart and son Stuart just outside of San Antonio, Texas. www.nataliatrevino.com

Charles Harper Webb

Charles Harper Webb, M.F.A., Ph.D. has published eight books of poetry, including Reading the Water, Liver, Tulip Farms & Leper Colonies, Hot Popsicles, and Amplified Do. Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems was published in 2009 by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which will publish Webb’s next collection, What Things Are Made Of, in 2012. Webb's awards in poetry include the Morse Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Felix Pollock Prize, and the Benjamin Saltman Prize. His poems have appeared in many distinguished journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Tin House, Poets of the New Century, Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize. A former professional rock musician and psychotherapist, he is the editor of Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, and recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, a fellowship from the Guggenheim foundation, and the CSULB Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. He directs the MFA Program at California State University, Long Beach.

Philip Jude Weitl is an Associate Professor of English and holder of the Ardis Butler James Endowed Chair at Doane College, where he was named the 2010 Teacher of the Year for his efforts. He teaches creative, technical, and expository writing and recently accepted an invitation to lead Doane College’s Health and the Humanities Working Group. Prior to this, he developed the Doane College Writing Center, which he directed for five years before passing those duties to a protégé in 2013. He holds an MFA in Writing from the University of Nebraska Omaha, as well as a Master of Arts in English and a Graduate Certificate in Technical and Professional Communication from Kansas State University. His work has been recognized by several literary magazines including The Briar Cliff Review, The Baltimore Review, Jelly Bucket, the Flint Hills Review, the Georgetown Review, Ruminate, and Limestone. His work also appears in Next Text, a 2007 instructional anthology. He has been a columnist and contributing editor for Nebraska Life, as well as a regular feature contributor. Prior to his academic career, he served as political campaign operative and then as the speechwriter and deputy press secretary for the Nebraska governor’s office.

Samuel Brett Williams

Samuel Brett Williams’ plays have been developed/produced at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Cherry Lane Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, Ars Nova, Naked Angels, the Kennedy Center, Yale University, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Joseph Beuys Theater (Moscow, Russia), the Gilded Balloon (Edinburgh, Scotland), and other theaters across the United States and Canada. Brett has received residencies/commissions from P73, the National Theater Institute, the National New Play Network, Theatre Squared, and Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey. He is a recipient of the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwright Award (past winners: Sarah Ruhl, Adam Rapp, and Annie Baker). For television, Brett has written for 26 Keys Productions (FARGO) and Hot Snakes Media. Recently, Brett adapted his play, THE REVIVAL, into a feature film, which finished principal photography in December 2015. Brett also wrote (with Jennifer Gerber) the original screenplay, PRETTY NEAR PERFECT, which will film in June 2016.

Leigh Allison Wilson

Leigh Allison Wilson is the author of two books of fiction and numerous stories, flash fiction and essays. Her first book, From the Bottom Up, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her second book, Wind, was nominated by William Morrow for a Pulitzer Prize. Her prose has appeared in The Georgia Review, Grand Street, Harper’s, The Kenyon Review , Mademoiselle, The Southern Review, among other magazines and journals. She has frequently reviewed books for The Washington Post Book World. Her work has been anthologized widely and read on NPR’s Selected Shorts.A graduate of Williams College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has taught in the Syracuse University MFA Program and mentored in the University of Nebraska MFA in Writing Program. Currently she directs the Program in Creative Writing at SUNY Oswego, in Oswego, New York.

Scott Working

Scott Working is a playwright, actor and director. He has performed throughout Omaha since the late 1980s. Most recently he performed in SNAP Productions Clybourne Park, produced and directed a dramatic evening of Edgar Allan Poe at historic Joslyn Castle and produced and directed a touring production of a multi-media show about Jackson Pollock. Some favorite projects of the last few years have been directing and being a part of the ensemble in Ellen Struve’s Nobody Gets Paid at the Shelterbelt Theatre, performing in Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol under the direction of Kevin Lawler at the Blue Barn Theatre, and being a part of the ensemble in Almost, Maine at the Omaha Community Playhouse. While finishing up his undergraduate study at the University of Nebraska–Omaha´s Writer´s Workshop, he founded the Shelterbelt Theatre. In July, as a part of the theatre’s 20th anniversary, they are remounting both his and Shelterbelt’s first play, V of Geese. He has a M.F.A. from the University of Iowa´s Playwright´s Workshop. Currently, he’s the Theatre Program Coordinator and full-time Theatre Instructor at Metropolitan Community College and Associate Artistic Director of the Great Plains Theatre Conference.

Gabrielle Zevin

Gabrielle Zevin is the New York Times Bestselling author of eight novels for adults and young adults. Her debut, Margarettown, was a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program. The Hole We’re In was on Entertainment Weekly’s Must List and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Entertainment Weekly wrote, “Every day newspaper articles chronicle families battered by the recession, circling the drain in unemployment and debt or scraping by with minimum-wage jobs. But no novel has truly captured that struggle until now.” Publishers Weekly called the novel “a Corrections for our recessionary times.” Her best-known young adult novel is Elsewhere. Elsewhere, an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book, was nominated for a Quill Award and received the Borders Original Voices Award. The book has been translated into over 20 languages. Of Elsewhere, the New York Times Book Review wrote, “Every so often a book comes along with a premise so fresh and arresting it seems to exist in a category all its own… Elsewhere, by Gabrielle Zevin, is such a book.” She is the screenwriter of Conversations with Other Women (Helena Bonham Carter, Aaron Eckhart) for which she received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination. In 2009, she and director Hans Canosa adapted her novel Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac(ALA Best Books for Young Adults) into the Japanese film, Dareka ga Watashi ni Kiss wo Shita. She has also written for the New York Times Book Review and NPR’s All Things Considered. She began her writing career at age fourteen as a music critic for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Zevin is a graduate of Harvard University. After many years on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, she recently moved to Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Her eighth novel, the New York Times Bestseller The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, was published in April 2014 by Algonquin and will also be published in 20 other languages. Read more about her on her website: www.gabriellezevin.com