Praise for Homecoming Parade

“Mark Sanders’ memoir, Homecoming Parade, is part elegy for those who have gone and part benediction for those who remain. Its tender contemplations, delivered in the sharpest and most elegant prose, take us deep into the heart of rural Nebraska, and deeper still into the glorious, questioning center of the author himself. This is a book to savor.”
—Lee Martin, Pulitzer finalist, author of The Bright Forever

“Deeply imagined, conceptually visionary, Sanders’ memoirs are shot through with startling moments of aesthetic arrest, heart-stopping grief, and hypnotic incantations. Part celebration, part haunting lament, Homecoming Parade is a consummate coming together of the sacred and the profane. Tapping into the metaphysical, transcendental, symbolic, and surreal, Sanders brings the words of James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, Shakespeare, Whitman, Yeats, and other poet-philosophers into discourse with his own life’s meditations on a singular conundrum: How to remain sensually alive while ‘fastened to a dying animal.’ A love letter to the boy he once was, an animation of what it means to be leashed to loneliness, a denunciation of war, disease, injury, and death, Homecoming Parade teaches us what it means to ‘sing with the breaking,’ to bear witness to the pain of the world and the pain we carry within ourselves, to open our eyes and ears to the magic of the mundane, to the mysteries not only of the elements but the elemental foundations of family, loss, and love—to ‘what is past, or passing, or to come.’”
—Kim Barnes, Pulitzer finalist, author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country

“Written with the lyricism of the best poetry, Mark Sanders’ collection of personal essays, Homecoming Parade, is rich with the details, delights, and disappointments of a well-remembered life. He gives us a rich montage—a grandmother waving a white handkerchief beside a Main Street parade, a pool hall sign commanding ‘No Boisterous Talk,’ a tall-for-his-age friend, early love and loss, a bag of Kitty Clover Potato Chips. Sanders has a deft ability to make the past live again in this book that takes us on the journey we all long for—the search for home.”
—Brent Spencer, author of The Last of Her

Mark Sanders is a native Nebraskan, born in Creighton and raised on the eastern rim of the Sandhills at Ord. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Kearney State College (now University of Nebraska at Kearney) and his first Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; he took a second Ph.D. in Education from the University of Idaho in 2013. Sanders has taught in Nebraska high schools and in colleges and universities in Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Idaho, and Texas. In 1979, he began his Sandhills Press imprint, which published early works of Plains and Nebraska writers. Additionally, Sanders has edited numerous books, among them A Sandhills Reader: 30 Years of Great Writing from the Great Plains,The Weight of the Weather: Regarding the Poetry of Ted Kooser, and, with co-editor JV Brummels, On Common Ground: The Poetry of William Kloefkorn, Ted Kooser, Greg Kuzma, and Don Welch. His most recent books of poetry are Landscapes, with Horses (SFA Press, 2018) and In a Good Time (WSC Press, 2019). He was the 2007 recipient of the Mildred Bennett Award for fostering Nebraska’s literary heritage, and he has won four Nebraska Book Awards, a Spur Award, and the Western Heritage Award. He currently lives, works, and farms in east Texas.

Homecoming Parade
Mark Sanders
Perfect Paperback: 232 pages
WSC Press (2024) $14
ISBN: 978-1-7379241-8-0