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, October 23, 2025. The Plains Writers Series is held several times a year to bring attention to the prose and poetry of Great Plains writers through reading and interacting with area audiences.
This Plains Writers Series will feature the legendary poet, David Lee. The reading will begin at 2 p.m. in the lounge on the second floor of the Humanities Building at Wayne State College. This event will be live-streamed on the Plains Writers Series Facebook page. This event is free and open to the public.
ABOUT THE READERS:
David Lee was Utah’s first poet laureate, and in 2001, he was a finalist for United States Poet Laureate. He is the author of two dozen volumes of poetry, including The Porcine Canticles, My Town, So Quietly the Earth, Last Call, and Rusty Barbed Wire: Selected Poems. A former seminary student and semi-pro baseball player (the only white player to ever play in the Texas Negro Leagues for the Post, Texas Blue Stars) and hog farmer, he has a PhD. with a concentration in John Milton and taught at Southern Utah University for over three decades where he received every teaching award given by the university including being named Professor of the Year on three occasions. His awards include multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Western States Book Award, Mountain and Plains States Booksellers Award, Critics Choice Award, Utah Book Awards, New York Public Library’s Poetry Book of the Year, Elkhorn Poetry Prize, Evolutionary Poem of the Year, Utah Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts, Utah Governor’s Merit Award in the Humanities and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. The Utah Humanities Council and Utah Education Association named him one of the top 12 writers in Utah literary history, and he was the 5th academic in Utah higher education to be named a Lifetime Fellow by the Utah Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retired, he scribbles and wanders rural roads and byways, all at about the same rate and pace, and maintains his intense training schedule to achieve his goal of becoming a World Class Piddler.