Writer’s Workshop and KVNO Partner to Present New Weekly Series

Beginning Monday, May 16, KVNO Radio will present “Writer’s Workshop On the Air,” a six-week series featuring live readings and interviews with renowned writers visiting the UNO campus as part of the Writer’s Workshop Reading Series.

Award-winning poet and short-story writer Nance Van Winckel kicks off the series on May 16, reading from her story collection Boneland and her poetry collection Pacific Walkers, answering audience questions, and talking with novelist and Writer’s Workshop faculty member Anna Monardo.

“Writer’s Workshop On the Air” is a production of KVNO Radio in collaboration with the UNO Writer’s Workshop, which has hosted the annual Reading Series for over 40 years as part of their BFA-degree program in Creative Writing.

“Writer’s Workshop On the Air” airs on Mondays at 2 P.M. on NewsRadio 90.7 KVNO HD 3 with a repeat at 6 P.M. The series will also stream live online at KVNOnews.com.

The program schedule is as follows:

May 16: Poet and short-story writer Nance Van Winckel
May 23: Novelist Monique Truong
May 30: Memoirist Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
June 6: Irish poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
June 13: Novelist and poet Janet McAdams
June 20: Poet Matt Mason

Author biographies:

Nance Van Winckel is a recipient of two National Endowment for The Arts grants, two Pushcart Prizes and numerous other awards. She has published seven poetry collections, most recently Pacific Walkers, which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award; and four story collections, most recently Boneland, as well as a novel in the form of a scrapbook, Ever Yrs. Nance is also a visual artist whose work melds photography with poetry. Her artwork has been included in exhibits throughout the Pacific Northwest. She currently teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program and is a Professor Emerita of the MFA Program of Eastern Washington University, where for many years she served as editor for the journal Willow Springs.

A Vietnamese American novelist and food essayist, Monique Truong is based in Brooklyn, New York. Her first novel, The Book of Salt (2003), was a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Fiction book, and the recipient of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, among other honors. Her second novel, Bitter In the Mouth (2010), received the American Academy of Arts and Letters's Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and was named a best fiction book of the year by Barnes & Noble and Hudson Booksellers. Her third novel, The Sweetest Fruits, is forthcoming from Viking Books. In the fall of 2016, Truong will be the Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College in New York City. A graduate of Yale University and Columbia University School of Law, Truong is also an intellectual property attorney. (Photo courtesy Marion Ettlinger)

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is the author of Descanso For My Father: Fragments Of A Life, winner of a Colorado Book Award and Independent Book Publisher Bronze Medal. His most recent memoir, Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams, won the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize. His work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, which selected his essay, “Beautiful City of Tirzah,” as among fifty outstanding works since 1970. His numerous awards include a New Letters Literary Award and a High Desert Journal Obsidian Prize. Fletcher is founding editor of Shadowbox and teaches in the Virginia Commonwealth University MFA in Writing Program. A native New Mexican, he lives in Richmond with his wife and two children.

Núala Ní Dhomhnaill (NOO-la Nee GO-nal), Ireland's foremost present-day poet writing in Irish. Her poetry has been translated into English by a number of well-known Irish poets, including Seamus Heaney, Medbh McGuckian, and Paul Muldoon. Irish themes, including language, are central to her poetry and range from ancient myths to small details of contemporary life. Her first collection was published in 1981, and the translation Selected Poems: Rogha Danta appeared in 1986. Her works have since been translated into Italian, Japanese, and Turkish.

Janet McAdams is the author of two poetry collections—Feral; and The Island of Lost Luggage, which won the Diane Decorah First Book Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas and the American Book Award. She has also written a novel, Red Weather. With Geary Hobson and Kathryn Walkiewicz, McAdams is co-editor of the anthology, The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing after Removal. In 2005, McAdams founded Salt Publishing's Earthworks book series, which focuses on indigenous poetry and contemporary Latin American poetry, translated and edited by Katherine Hedeen and Victor Rodriguez-Nunez. McAdams lives in Gambier, Ohio, and teaches at Kenyon College, where she is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Poetry.

Matt Mason has won a Pushcart Prize and two Nebraska Book Awards (for Poetry in 2007 and Anthology in 2006); organized and run poetry programming with the U.S. Department of State in Kathmandu, Nepal and Minsk, Belarus; and been on five teams at the National Poetry Slam. He is executive director of the Nebraska Writers Collective, has served as board president of the Nebraska Center for the Book, and is the Nebraska State Coordinator for Poetry Out Loud, a Poetry Foundation/NEA program. His 2^nd full length poetry book, The Baby That Ate Cincinnati, was released by Stephen F. Austin University Press in 2013. Mason lives in Omaha with his wife, the poet Sarah McKinstry-Brown, and their two daughters.