Twyla M. Hansen (born 1949) is an American poet, who served as the Nebraska State Poet until 2018. She is the third Nebraskan and first woman to hold this position, to which she was appointed by Governor Dave Heineman in November 2013. [1]
Hansen was raised near the town of Lyons in northeast Nebraska and currently lives in Lincoln. She holds a bachelor's degree in horticulture and a master's degree in agroecology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. [2] While working as grounds manager and arboretum curator at Nebraska Wesleyan University, Hansen took classes from poet William Kloefkorn, who became one of her mentors. [3] [4] Hansen was appointed to replace Kloefkorn as Nebraska State Poet after his death in 2011.
Carl August Sandburg was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major figure in contemporary literature", especially for volumes of his collected verse, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920). He enjoyed "unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life". When he died in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson observed that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America."
Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.
Theodore J. Kooser is an American poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2005. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006. Kooser was one of the first poets laureate selected from the Great Plains, and is known for his conversational style of poetry.
Matt Mason is an American poet based in Omaha, Nebraska, born in 1968. In 2019, he was named Nebraska's 3rd State Poet, serving from 2019 until November 2023. He has published eight chapbooks and two full-length works of poetry as well as two anthologies. Mason has written about fatherhood, relationships, religion and the Bible, and themes of Midwest and Great Plains life. Mason's early work gave him a reputation as a humorous poet, but he has written comedy, drama, and tragedy.
Mari Susette Sandoz was a Nebraska novelist, biographer, lecturer, and teacher. She became one of the West's foremost writers, and wrote extensively about pioneer life and the Plains Indians.
The Backwaters Press was a small press based in Omaha, Nebraska. It was a 501(c)(3) non-profit devoted to publishing poetry and literary fiction, with a special emphasis on the literature of Nebraska.
William Charles "Bill" Kloefkorn, was a Nebraska poet and educator based in Lincoln, Nebraska. He was the author of twelve collections of poetry, two short story collections, a collection of children's Christmas stories, and four memoirs. Additionally Kloefkorn was professor of English from 1962 to his retirement in 1997 to professor emeritus of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is an American poet and editor. Her debut book, Dog Road Woman, won the American Book Award and was the first finalist of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Diane DeCora Award. Since then, she has written five more books and edited eight anthologies. She is known for addressing issues of culture, prejudice, rights, the environment, peace, violence, abuse, and labor in her poetry and other creative works.
Don Welch was an American poet and academic who was born in Hastings, Nebraska. The author of several published poetry collections and a regular contributor to literary magazines, Welch was an English literature professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney from 1959 to 1997. While there, he was awarded the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in English, Poetry & Creative Writing. In June 2001, a bronze sculpture of Welch was finished and dedicated to him on the campus.
Denise Low is an American poet, honored as the second Kansas poet laureate (2007–2009). A professor at Haskell Indian Nations University, Low taught literature, creative writing and American Indian studies courses at the university. She was succeeded by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg on July 1, 2009.
Michael Robert Collier is an American poet, teacher, creative writing program administrator and editor. He has published five books of original poetry, a translation of Euripides' Medea, a book of prose pieces about poetry, and has edited three anthologies of poetry. From 2001 to 2004 he was the Poet Laureate of Maryland. As of 2011, he is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a professor of creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park and the poetry editorial consultant for Houghton Mifflin.
Ted Genoways is an American journalist and author. He is a contributing writer at Mother Jones and The New Republic, and an editor-at-large at Pacific Standard. His books include This Blessed Earth and The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food.
Linnea Johnson is an American poet, and feminist writer, winner of the inaugural Beatrice Hawley Award for The Chicago Home. Johnson was raised in Chicago, and lives and writes in Topeka, Kansas. She earned a B.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and an M.A. in writing and women's studies from Goddard College. She has hosted radio shows on WGLT-FM and on KRNU. Among her performance pieces are Swedish Christmas and a multi-media piece, Crazy Song. She studied papermaking at Carriage House Paper in Boston, and is founder and director of Red Stuga Studio and Espelunda 3 Productions, a Writing, Creativity, and Mentoring Consultancy also offering classes in creativity, poetry, prose, and play writing; Play, CD, and Staged Reading Productions. Her photographs can be found in Blatant Image, Nebraska Review, Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Poetry Journal.
Lee Ann Roripaugh is an American poet and was the South Dakota poet laureate from 2015 to 2019. Lee Ann Roripaugh is the author of five volumes of poetry: tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, Dandarians, On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year, Year of the Snake, and Beyond Heart Mountain. She was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series.
Linda Boyden is an American poet and children's books writer.
Paul Austin Johnsgard was an ornithologist, artist and emeritus professor at the University of Nebraska. His works include nearly fifty books including several monographs, principally about the waterfowl and cranes.
The following works deal with the cultural, political, economic, military, biographical and geologic history of pre-territorial South Dakota, the southern part of Dakota Territory and the State of South Dakota.
Paul Dickey is an American poet, author, philosophy instructor, and playwright who has published three books of poetry and a full-length play, The Good News According to St. Dude, that analyzes and dramatizes the disillusion of the 1960s youth counter-culture.
Michael Anania is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. His modernist poetry meticulously evokes Midwestern prairies and rivers. His autobiographical novel, Red Menace, captured mid-twentieth century cold war angst and the colloquial speech of Nebraska, while the voice in his volumes of poetry distinctively reflects rural and urban Midwestern life in a "mixture of personal voice, historical fact, journalistic observation and a haiku-like format that pares lines down to the bare bones and pushes language to its limit."
The Poet Laureate of Nebraska is the poet laureate for the U.S. state of Nebraska.