PWS Dec. 10th, 2015

 

PWS April 30 2015 small

This fall’s Plains Writers Series will highlight two authors, Luke Hawley and Lisa Sandlin. The authors will share selected pieces of their recent works in the second floor lounge in the Humanities Building at Wayne State College at 2:00 pm.

Following the Plains Writers Series will be the Lucky 13 Fiction Slam. The fiction slam will be held at The Max Bar and Grill in downtown Wayne, NE starting at 7:00 pm, with required prelims starting at 5:00 pm. If anyone would like to participate in the slam they will need two original short stories and $5 for registration at the door. All events are free and open to the public.

AUTHOR BIOS:

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. 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.

LISA SANDLIN

Lisa Sandlin was born in the Gulf Coast oil town of Beaumont, Texas, and lived there before and after a transfer sent her family to Naples, Italy, for three years. She graduated from Rice University in Houston and then lived many years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Once she had earned an M.F.A. in Writing at Vermont College, Sandlin packed a small car and headed for Nebraska in January. She taught at Wayne State College 1997-2009, with semester leaves to teach at The University of Texas and Kadir Has University in Istanbul, Turkey. Sandlin’s fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Southwest Review, Crazy Horse, StoryQuarterly, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere and her nonfiction in The New York Times Book Review and in anthologies. Her books are The Famous Thing About Death (Cinco Puntos Press, 1991); Message to the Nurse of Dreams (Cinco Puntos Press, 1997), winner of the Violet Crown Award from the Austin Writers League and the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters; In the River Province (Southern Methodist University Press, 2004), a finalist for the Jones award; and the forthcoming You Who Make the Sky Bend, a collaboration with New Mexican retablo artist Catherine Ferguson (Pinyon Publishing). Sandlin also served as a co-editor of Times of Sorrow, Times of Grace (2002) from Omaha’s own Backwaters Press. She has received an NEA Fellowship, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, and she teaches at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her latest book The Do Right, published by Cinco Puntos Press, was released in October of 2015.