Spring 2025 Writer's Workshop Reading Series
We welcome you to the Spring 2025 Reading Series! It's a great line up of author's and writer's to inspire. All events are free and open to the public.
Holly Pelesky | Wed | Feb 12 | 7:30p | UNO Art Gallery
Holly Pelesky writes essays, fiction and poetry. She received her MFA from the University of Nebraska. Her prose can be found in CutBank, HAD, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, other places. Her collection of letters to her daughter, Cleave, was published by Autofocus Books. She is working on a novel featuring a messy protagonist named Janice. She works as a librarian while raising boys and roommating with her adult daughter in Omaha.
Chris Harding Thornton | Wed | Feb 26 | 7:30p | Criss Library
Nebraska-born Chris Harding Thornton holds an MFA from the University of Washington and a PhD from the University of Nebraska. Her first novel, Pickard County Atlas (MCD/FSG), was chosen by author Tana French (In the Woods, The Searcher) as a PBS Masterpiece Best Mystery of 2021. The book was also featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere. It was released in paperback (Picador) and appeared in German translation (Polar Verlag) in 2022. Her second novel, Little Underworld (MCD/FSG), was released in March 2024 and was a USA Today bestseller.
Steve Langan | Wed | Mar 26 | 7:30p | MBSC Ballroom
Steve Langan graduated from UNO and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and returned to UNO years later to teach and help lead UNO Medical Humanities. His books are Freezing, Notes on Exile & Other Poems, Meet Me at the Happy Bar, What It Looks Like, How It Flies, and Bedtime Stories (Littoral Books, 2024). Langan’s poems are in a variety of journals, including Columbia, Cutbank, Diagram, DoubleTake, Fence, MAKE, Meridian, Octopus, Pool, Shade, Slope, Verse, and Witness. He lives in Maine.
Susan Aizenberg | Wed | Apr 2 | 7:30p | UNO Art Gallery
Susan Aizenberg’s newest collection is A Walk with Frank O’Hara: Poems (University of New Mexico Press/Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series 2024.) She’s also the author of two earlier full-length collections, Quiet City (BkMk 2015) and Muse (Crab Orchard 2002) and co-editor with Erin Belieu of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia UP 2001). Aizenberg is professor emerita at Creighton University and now lives and writes in Iowa City, Iowa.
Camille T. Dungy | Mon | Apr 7 | 7:30p | MBSC Nebraska Room
Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster: May 2023). She has also written Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Dungy is the poetry editor for Orion magazine. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, The 1619 Project, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, and venues including The New Yorker, Poetry, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, and Poets.org.
Co-sponsored by the UNO English Department
Christine Burright | Wed | Apr 16 | 7:30p | Benson Theater
Christine Burright is a screenwriter currently based out of Omaha, Nebraska. Her television pilots and screenplays have been named finalists in NBC Writers on the Verge, Launch Pad Pilots, Atlanta Film Festival and the John Milius Screenwriting Award, and have competed in festivals from Los Angeles to Berlin. Her first produced feature screenplay The Headliner premiered 2024 and will be available on streaming in 2025. Christine directs and produces short films and is the half of animation and production studio, Crispy Pickle Films. She holds a BFA and MFA in Creative Writing from UNO.