(Poetry) TERI YOUMANS GRIMM A recipient of a Nebraska Arts Council Fellowship, Teri Youmans Grimm’s debut collection of poems, Dirt Eaters, was chosen for the University of Central Florida’s Poetry Series and was published by the University Press of Florida. She received her MFA from Vermont College and was a former instructor in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She has also served as the managing editor for Zoo Press and as a contributing editor for Hunger Mountain and The Nebraska Review. Her work has appeared in the Connecticut Review, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, among other journals. She is currently researching and working on a series of poems exploring her family’s history with slavery and racism.

"It is my philosophy that as students, one should not only write in the way that is comfortable, but in a way that challenges the sensibilities. I’ve met many writers who fear reading authors who differ stylistically from themselves or who hesitate to try new approaches to their writing because they fear it will change their 'voice.' It’s my belief that reading and studying a wide variety of writers, subjects, and aesthetics doesn’t change the voice. It gives it dimension.”

(Fiction/CNF) AMY HASSINGER received her BA from Barnard College and her MFA from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. She is the author of two novels. The Priest's Madonna (Putnam 2006), a Book Sense Notable Book, is being translated into Dutch, Indonesian, Russian, and Spanish. Nina: Adolescence (Putnam 2003) won a Publisher's Weekly Listen Up! Award, and was selected as an Audio Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine. Amy received a 2006 Finalist Award in prose from the Illinois Arts Council and was named a semi-finalist for the 2005 Julia Peterkin Award.  Her stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Fourth Genre, Hunger Mountain, Arts and Letters, and Salt Hill. You can read her essay "Getting Books" online at LiteraryMama.com (January 2008) and can find a writing exercise of hers in Naming the World, edited by Bret Anthony Johnston (Random House 2007). She is also the author of the Maine studies textbook Finding Katahdin: An Exploration of Maine's Past (University of Maine Press 2001). Amy has taught middle school students as well as undergraduates. She lives in Urbana, Illinois. www.amyhassinger.com

"I believe the teacher's role is to be a coach. This model is especially appropriate in the teaching of writing, because students learn primarily through practice. Writing is ultimately a solitary endeavor, and while the writer can gain a valuable perspective on her work from peer and mentor comments, it is finally her task to return to the page, to form the words and sentences alone. As coach, my role is to lead the cheer when the writer's practice has produced good results, and to provide pointed and constructive critique—as regards language choice, characterization, imagery, structure, tone, voice, the overall arc of a story or essay—when it has not. I look at a piece's purpose, what it's trying to be, first of all, and then address whether or not it has succeeded. I like to play the 'believing game,' as Peter Elbow calls it: entering the critique of a piece with faith in its potential, rather than with a mission to search and destroy."

(Poetry/CNF/Fiction)   ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE holds the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Hedge Coke’s books include: Dog Road Woman (American Book Award) and Off-Season City Pipe (Labor volume, Wordcraft Writer of the Year in Poetry), both poetry from Coffee House Press; Blood Run (free verse-play regarding the Indigenous mound site in Iowa and South Dakota), Salt Publications (UK); Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer (memoir, AIROS Book of the Month Selection), University of Nebraska Press; a chapbook, The Year of the Rat, a dramatic long poem regarding her bout with illness from rat infestation, and she has edited six anthologies, including: Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry (the first collection of Indigenous poetry inclusive of the Western Hemisphere, To Topos Edition, Oregon State University), They Wanted Children, Coming to Life, and the soon to be released Effigies (Salt Publications, UK). Hedge Coke formerly held an National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Visiting Professor in Writing position at Hartwick College, NY and was a core faculty member teaching writing, literature, philosophy, education, cultural studies, and poetry in the MFA program at Northern Michigan University. She has won numerous awards for her writing and excellence in teaching, and performs on an international basis, most recently in Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela. Her lineage includes: Huron, Cherokee, Creek, Metis, French Canadian, Portuguese, English, Irish, Scot, French, and Swiss blood. She has been instrumental in creating literary venues and programming with a special focus on incarcerated youth and underserved communities. She has presented literary and artistic workshops for over 25 years. She is a Black Earth Institute Think Tank and MacDowell Fellow and she is visiting faculty in the summer sessions at Naropa University MFA program.

“My teaching goals include inspiration of creative process and thought, instilling a zest for learning and encouraging theoretical and philosophical arenas, complementing the ongoing search for analysis and further development in writing and producing literary works.  I believe it is duty to impart that which we accumulate in life.  To foster a new generation of writers and thinkers in the world would then be the duty of any writer.  It seems a virtual force of nature leads me to engage in teaching, inasmuch as nature causes me to write. The nature of education may successfully render resources for people to reach common goals and covenants, perhaps freeing man from certain friction.  I believe a teacher’s role is one that encourages students to find their niche, their inspiration, and to expand their horizons simultaneously fulfilling individual relation to the world around them.

“Ultimately, the concentration on image and development of language in an experiential sense are necessary engagements for students.  In an upper level course, possibility becomes more important as an endeavor to encourage and explore.  In a graduate program, my role as an educator is most certainly that of a mentor and provider of possibility, direction, and choice.  I look forward to each new semester with the hope of adding to students’ accumulation of knowledge and realization of purpose, with a sense of duty to ensure I pass along whatever is possible to make certain they carry with them the best I have to offer.  Positive influence on a portion of the new generation of writers, readers, and thinkers is, in my mind, what I intend to leave behind.”

(Fiction) Novelist and short story writer PATRICIA HENLEY has taught for 18 years in the MFA Program at Purdue University. She is the author of three collections of short stories: Friday Night at Silver Star, winner of the 1985 Montana First Book Award; The Secret of Cartwheels; and Worship of the Common Heart, New and Selected Stories. Her first novel, Hummingbird House, was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award and The New Yorker Fiction Prize. Her second novel, In the River Sweet, was published by Pantheon in 2002. A Polish translation of In the River Sweet was published in Warsaw in the fall of 2006. Her stories have appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, and The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has given readings, lectures, and conducted workshops in many venues nationwide.

“I am a nuts-and-bolts teacher of fiction writing. I focus on the study and practice of craft elements, doing line by line critiques, and exploring big picture issues, helping students discover the answers to such questions as, How do I find my own voice? And what is my true subject matter? I emphasize sentence construction as a fine art and using your own life as a laboratory for cooking up stories.”

(Poetry/CNF) ART HOMER was raised in the Missouri Ozarks and the Pacific Northwest. He worked on forest trail crews, as an animal caretaker, and as a journeyman ironworker before finishing his education at Portland State University and the University of Montana Graduate Program in Creative Writing. He worked for two years in the Montana Poets in the Schools, has edited Portland Review, CutBank, SmokeRoot Press, and The Nebraska Review—and has taught at several colleges and universities. Since 1982, he has taught poetry and nonfiction writing at the University of Nebraska at Omaha Writer’s Workshop, where he was named a Regents Professor in 1995. Homer’s most recent of four poetry collections, Sight is No Carpenter, was published by WordTech Press in November 2005. His nonfiction book, The Drownt Boy: An Ozark Tale (University of Missouri Press, 1994) was a finalist for the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. His books have been reviewed in The Bloomsbury Review, Iowa Review, L.A. Times Book Review, Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, the Des Moines Register, Kansas City Star, Western American Literature, Western Humanities Review and elsewhere. His awards include a Nebraska Arts Council Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. He and his wife, poet & fine press printer Alison Wilson, are growing grapes in a corner of their 80 acres. They have built their own house in the opposite corner. Art is the proud owner of an old pickup and a young chocolate Lab to ride in the back.

“I’m often asked 'What is it, exactly, that you teach?' My answer is ‘Synthesis,’ as described by Benjamin Bloom in Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. One of the 'higher level' objectives in a hierarchical system—each level depending upon mastery of those below it—synthesis (putting together) comes after analysis (taking apart) and before evaluation (judgment). Analysis seems easily taught, and judgment nearly impossible to teach. To my mind, the common problems of rushing to judgment and lack of judgment in our intellectual life stem from skipping the step of synthesis in our education—from ignoring creativity in our thinking. I believe that creativity and originality are more important than earnestness and conviction in judging achievement—and in achieving judgment.”

(Poetry) WILLIAM KLOEFKORN was named the Nebraska State Poet by proclamation of the Unicameral in 1982. A retired professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, he is the author of many collections of poetry and other books, including Out of Attica, (Backwaters Press, 2008),  Alvin Turner as Farmer (Logan House, 2004), Sunrise, Dayglow, Sunset, Moon (Talking River Publications, 2004), and Walking the Campus (Lone Willow Press, 2004). He has also published three memoirs, This Death by Drowning (U of Nebraska P, 2001), Restoring the Burnt Child (U of Nebraska Press, 2003), and At Home n This Moveable Earth (U of Nebraska Press, 2006); his fourth memoir, Breathing in the Fullness of Time, is forthcoming in 2009 . He is the author of two collections of short fiction, A Time to Sink Her Pretty Little Ship (Logan House Press, 1999) and Shadow Boxer (Logan House Press, 2003). Other books include Sergeant Patrick Gass, Chief Carpenter: On the Trail with Lewis and Clark (Spoon River), Uncertain the Final Run to Winter (Windflower Press), Loup River Psalter (Spoon River), Welcome to Carlos (Spoon River), and Drinking the Tin Cup Dry (White Pine Press, 1989). His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Review, Carolina Quarterly, Columbia, Crazyhorse, Cream City Review, Georgia Review, Great River Review, Hanging Loose, Hiram Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Kansas Quarterly, Laurel Review, Midwest Quarterly, Mississippi Review, New Orleans Review, Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Quarterly, West Branch, Wisconsin Review, Zone 3 and elsewhere. In addition to his many publications and honors, he won first-place in the 1978 Nebraska Hog-Calling Championship.

(Poetry) STEVE LANGAN graduated from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received the Paul Engle Postgraduate Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation. His debut collection, Freezing, appeared in 2001 from New Issues Press. Notes on Exile & Other Poems, his chapbook, received the 2005 Weldon Kees Award from Backwaters Press. His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Chicago Review, DoubleTake, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, Verse, Fence and Shade; recent publications include Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, The Iowa Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Tarpaulin Sky and Zoland Poetry. Langan is executive director of ALS in the Heartland, a non-profit health agency, and he’s working toward a Ph.D. in medical humanities at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, concentrating on collaborating with physicians on creative writing projects. He received the Merit Award from the Nebraska Arts Council in 2003, and he’s been nominated for the 2008 Pushcart Prize. He recently completed a manuscript of poems titled “Meet Me at the Happy Bar.”

“In workshop and through correspondence and conversations during the mentoring process, I seek to guide writers toward achieving fullness in their poems and discursive writing—challenging them along the way to broaden aesthetic notions and their reading of poetry from the tradition and contemporary work—helping them work to develop an original voice.”