Several well-known fiction writers from across the region will read from their works during a special two-day event in Norfolk and Wayne in April.
The Northeast Community College Visiting Writers Series and Wayne State College’s Plains Writers Series are partnering to sponsor the Nebraska Fiction Festival on Wednesday and Thursday, April 17 and 18, on the institution’s respective campuses in Norfolk and Wayne.
The featured fiction writers scheduled to read at the Nebraska Fiction Festival are Tosca Lee, Lydia Kang, Ted Wheeler, Karen Shoemaker, Rebecca Rotert, Dave Mainelli, Kevin Clouther, Margie Lukas, David Mullins, Sean Doolittle, and Chris H. Thornton. (Schedule & author bios below)
The Nebraska Fiction Festival will be held Wednesday, April 17, from 11 a.m.-3 p.m., in Northeast Community College’s Union 73. The event continues Thursday, April 18, from 11 a.m.-3 p.m., in Wayne State College’s Gardner Hall.
Following the Nebraska Fiction Festival on April 18 will be the WSC Fiction Slam. The slam will be held at the Max Bar and Grill in downtown Wayne, NE, starting at 7:00 p.m., with registration starting at 6:30 p.m. Slam participants need two original short stories and a $5 registration fee. Cash & prizes for the top 4 slam winners.
All events are free and open to the public. For more information on the Nebraska Fiction Festival, contact: Chad Christensen ([email protected]) Bonnie Johnson-Bartee ([email protected]).
Facebook Event pages: April 17, 2024 @ NECC & April 18, 2024 @ WSC.
NECC (Union 73) event times:
11:00 – 12:00 p.m.
Margie Lukas & Dave Mainelli
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Kevin Clouther & Karen Shoemaker
2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Tosca Lee & an open forum
WSC (Gardner Hall) event times:
11:00 – 12:00 p.m.
Rebecca Rotert & David Mullins
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Sean Doolittle & Chris H. Thornton
2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Ted Wheeler & Lydia Kang
About the Fiction Writers
Margaret Lukas received her BFA from the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and her MFA from Rainier Writer’s Workshop in Tacoma Washington. She taught at the University of Nebraska, Omaha for eleven years. Her Short story, “The Yellow Bird,” was made into a “short” and premiered at Cannes Film Festival. She is a recipient of the Nebraska Arts Council, Individual Artist Fellowship Award. Her work appears in numerous anthologies, and she is a past contributor to Nebraskaland Magazine. Her novels include: Farthest House, BQB Press, 2015. River People, BQB Press (International High Plains Book Award Winner) 2019, The Broken Statue, BQB Press, 2021. A Lakota Education is currently seeking representation while she works on her newest novel. She lives in Omaha.
Dave Mainelli teaches creative writing at Wayne State and The University of Nebraska at Omaha. WSC Press published his short story collection, How to Be Lonely, in March 2021. His writing has also been published in Curbside Splendor, Fine Lines, Restaurant Journal, and Emerging Nebraska Writers. He served on the Board of Directors for Red Hen Press and is currently a fiction editor for The Good Life Review. Mainelli has a lengthy background in the bar industry as an owner, the music industry as a musician/songwriter, and loneliness as a human being.
Kevin Clouther is the author of the story collections Maximum Speed (Cornerstone) and We Were Flying to Chicago(Catapult). His stories have appeared in Confrontation, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Joyland, and Ruminate, among other journals. He holds degrees from the University of Virginia and Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the recipient of the Richard Yates Fiction Award and Gell Residency Award. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha Writer’s Workshop, where he directs the MFA in Writing. He lives with his wife and two children in Omaha.
Karen Gettert Shoemaker writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, book reviews, journal entries, and endless lists. Her recent work includes a reflection on the role of ordinary people during a pandemic, which was published in the New York Timesin 2020. Her novel, The Meaning of Names, was selected for the One Book One Nebraska statewide reading program in 2016 and the Omaha Reads community reading program in 2014. It was republished in China in 2020. Her short story collection, Night Sounds and Other Stories, was published in the US in 2002, and republished in the United Kingdom in 2006. She is the founder of Larksong Writers Place, a literary nonprofit based in Lincoln.
Tosca Lee is a New York Times bestselling author of twelve novels including The Line Between, The Progeny, The Legend of Sheba, Iscariot, and The Long March Home (with New York Times bestselling author Marcus Brotherton). Her work has been translated into seventeen languages and optioned for TV and film. She is the recipient of multiple awards including ECPA Book of the Year in fiction, two International Book Awards, and Killer Nashville’s Silver Falchion. In addition to the New York Times, her books have appeared on the IndieBound and Christian bestseller lists, and Library Journal’s Best Of lists. Lee’s work has been praised by Publisher’s Weekly, The Historical Novel Society, Booklist, Kirkus, Woman’s World, BookReporter, The Dallas Morning News, and The Midwest Book Review, as “deeply human…” “powerful…” and “mind-bending historical fiction.” A public speaker with 30 years of experience, Lee is a featured presenter at writer’s conferences and literary events throughout the nation and currently serves on the board of directors for International Thriller Writers. Lee earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Smith College. She also studied at Oxford University. A former Fortune Global 500 consultant and first runner-up to Mrs. United States, she lives in Nebraska with her family. For more on Tosca, please visit: www.toscalee.com.
Rebecca Rotert received her MA from Hollins College in Virginia. Her novel, Last Night at the Blue Angel, was published in 2014. A collection of poems, All the Animals We Ever Were, was published in November of 2017. Understory, an epic poem, was published in 2020. Her work has appeared in Santa Clara Review, America magazine, and the New York Times among others. The essay, Proteus on the Vasa was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her novel was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her awards include The American Academy of Poets Prize, the Friends of American Writers Award, and the Nebraska Book Award. Rotert teaches in the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and is a painter with the Artists’ Cooperative Gallery in Omaha, NE.
David Philip Mullins is the author of Greetings from Below, a collection of short stories, which won both the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the International Walter Scott Prize for Short Stories, and The Brightest Place in the World, a novel, which won the Nebraska Book Award. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and other publications. He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Nebraska Arts Council, and the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. He is a professor of English at Creighton University.
Sean Doolittle is the author of eight crime and suspense novels, most recently Device Free Weekend from Grand Central Publishing. Sean was born and raised in Southeast Nebraska and majored in English at UNL, graduating with an M.A. in 1994. His books have received the International Thriller Writers Thriller Award, the Barry Award, and two Nebraska Book Award honor citations. He currently lives in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Chris Harding Thornton, a seventh-generation Nebraskan, holds an MFA from the University of Washington and a PhD from the University of Nebraska, where she taught courses in writing and literature. She has also worked as a quality assurance overseer at a condom factory, a jar-lid screwer at a plastics plant, a closer at Burger King, a record store clerk, an all-ages club manager, and a PR writer. Pickard County Atlas is her first novel.
Theodore Wheeler is the author of three novels, most recently The War Begins in Paris (Little Brown, 2023). He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Nebraska Arts Council, and Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. For fourteen years, Theodore worked as a journalist who covered law and politics, and he now teaches creative writing in the English Department at Creighton University. He is also director of Omaha Lit Fest and, with his wife, operates Dundee Book Company, an independent neighborhood bookshop.
Lydia Kang is an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and an award-winning and bestselling author of adult fiction, young adult fiction, and science non-fiction. Her novels include Opium and Absinthe, A Beautiful Poison, The Impossible Girl, and The Half-Life of Ruby Fielding. Her Star Wars writing includes Star Wars: Cataclysm and shorts stories in Star Wars Insider magazine and From A Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back. Her young adult novels include The November Girl (a Nebraska Book Award winner), Toxic, and the upcoming K-Jane with Quill Tree Books. Her nonfiction includes Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything (NPR Science Friday Best Science Book of 2017), Patient Zero: A Curious History of the World’s Worst Diseases (Publisher’s Weekly starred review and Nebraska Book Award winner), and the upcoming Pseudoscience, with Workman Publishing.