Wayne State College’s Language and Literature Department, the School of Arts and Humanities and the WSC Press are pleased to hold this fall’s Plains Writers Series on Thursday, November 19, 2015. The Plains Writers Series is held several times a year in an attempt to bring attention to the prose and poetry of local Great Plains writers through reading and interacting with area audiences.

This fall’s Plains Writers Series will highlight four authors: Sara Henning, Jim Reese, Mark Sanders, and Tom C. Hunley. The authors will share selected pieces of their recent works in the lounge on the second floor of the Humanities Building at Wayne State College at 1:00 pm and again at 2:00 pm.

• 1:00 pm – Sara Henning and Jim Reese
• 2:00 pm – Mark Sanders and Tom C. Hunley

Following the Plains Writers Series will be Poetry Slam XXXIV. The poetry slam will be held at The Max Bar and Grill in downtown Wayne, NE starting at 7:00 pm, with registration starting at 6:00 pm. If anyone would like to participate in the slam they will need 4 original poems and $5 for registration at the door. All events are free and open to the public.

AUTHOR BIOS:

Sara Henning is the author of A Sweeter Water (Lavender Ink 2013), as well as two chapbooks, Garden Effigies (Dancing Girl Press 2015) and To Speak of Dahlias (Finishing Line Press 2012). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Crazyhorse, Quarterly West, Green Mountains Review, Crab Orchard Review, and RHINO. Winner of the 2015 Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, she is currently a doctoral student in English and Creative Writing at the University of South Dakota, where she serves as associate editor of Sundress Publications. sarahenning.net

Jim Reese is an Associate Professor of English; Director of the Great Plains Writers’ Tour at Mount Marty College in Yankton, South Dakota; and Editor-in-Chief of 4 PM Count. Reese’s poetry and prose have been widely published, most recently in New York Quarterly, Poetry East, Paterson Literary Review, Louisiana Literature Review and elsewhere.

In 2015 Reese received an Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and in 2012 a Distinguished Public Service Award in recognition of his exemplary dedication and contributions to the Education Department at the Yankton Federal Prison Camp.

Since 2008, Reese has been one of six artists-in-residence throughout the country who are part of the National Endowment for the Arts’ interagency initiative with the Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Prisons. His book Really Happy was published by New York Quarterly Books in 2014.

Reese and his family live in southern South Dakota, near John Wesley Powell’s one hundredth meridian—better than most determinants for where the American West begins. jimreese.org

Mark Sanders is a Great Plains native–born, raised, and educated in Nebraska, where he took his first Ph.D. in 1989; he holds a second Ph.D. in Higher Education Leadership from the University of Idaho (2013). His poems, stories, critical essays, and creative essays have appeared in publications in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, including Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, River Teeth, and Western American Literature. Among his books of poetry are Before We Lost Our Ways, Here in the Big Empty, The Suicide, Conditions of Grace: New and Selected Poems, and Landscapes, with Horses. His critical publications include Riddled with Light: Metaphor in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and The Weight of the Weather: Regarding the Poetry of Ted Kooser. His forthcoming short story collection is Why Guineas Fly, and a retrospective anthology, A Sandhills Reader: Thirty Years of Great Writing from the Great Plains, is due out late 2015. Mark Sander’s website

Tom C. Hunley is a professor of English/Creative Writing at Western Kentucky University, the director of Steel Toe Books, and a guitarist/songwriter for Night of the Living Dead Poets Society. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose and the co-editor, with Alexandria Peary, of Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century (Southern Illinois University Press 2015). His poems have appeared in Paddlefish, Southern Poetry Review, Rattle, TriQuarterly, New York Quarterly, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His latest book from WSC Press is titled Plunk. Tom Hunley’s website

WHEN: Thursday, November 19, 2015

WHERE: Humanities Building 2nd Floor Lounge, Wayne State College / SLAM @ Max Bar & Grill

TIME: PWS @ 1:00 pm and 2:00 pm / REGISTRATION @ 6:00 pm / SLAM @ 7:00 pm