Celebrate National Poetry Month with workshops and readings at Kearney Public Library

Matt Mason

The celebration of National Poetry Month continues April 18, 2024, with Nebraska State Poet Matt Mason leading an afternoon workshop and an evening poetry reading.

Join us for a poetry writing workshop with Matt Mason at 12:00 p.m. on April 18, 2024. Workshop includes lunch for registered participants. Register by calling the library at 308-233-3282.  At 7:00 p.m. Matt will also present an evening of poetry. He is the current Nebraska State Poet and was Executive Director of the Nebraska Writers Collective from 2009-2022. Through the US State Department, he has run workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus. Mason is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Nebraska Arts Council. Funding for this program is provided by Humanities Nebraska, the Nebraska Cultural Endowment, and the State of Nebraska.

On Tuesday, April 23, 2024, join Nebraska poets Mary K. Stillwell, Rex Walton, and Karla Hernandez Torrijos at 12:00 p.m. for a writing workshop and then at 7:00 p.m. enjoy an evening poetry reading. Registration is requested for the workshop that will include lunch for registered participants. Mary K. Stillwell was born in Omaha, studied writing in New York with William Packard and on the Great Plains with Ted Kooser. She earned her PhD in plains literature, has published widely, and co-edited Nebraska Presence, an anthology of contemporary Nebraska poets (Backwaters).

Karla Hernandez Torrijos is a poet and workshop facilitator who has been invited to read in venues across Nebraska, including The Bay, El Museo Latino, and The UNL Wick Alumni Center. The recipient of the 2022-2023 Irby F. Wood Prize for Poetry and the 2020-2021 Vreeland Award for Poetry, her writing interrogates our understanding of home, displacement, and the liminal space in between. She is an UNL undergraduate student.

Rex Walton, a poet and longtime member of the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association (NLHA), Rex worked with aspiring writers in the "Writers Write!" program through the NLHA. He organized “Poetry at the Moon”, a weekly series at Crescent Moon Coffee in Lincoln hosting over 250 readings with
many writers from across Nebraska and Iowa.

All programs are free and open to the public at the Kearney Public Library located at 2020 1st Avenue, Kearney, NE.