New database features Nebraska authors

We are pleased to announce a new, publicly available database that features the work of Nebraska authors. The database can be accessed at nebraskaauthors.org.



The content digitally available in the Nebraska Authors database comes from the special collection on Nebraska Authors at the Lincoln City Libraries, known as the Jane Pope Geske Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors. The information has been collected by many dedicated volunteers and staff members over the past 50 years. Read more about the project here.

Support from the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association, Lincoln City Libraries, and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) make this database available.

The database was unveiled at Lincoln City Libraries on Sunday, April 22. The Lincoln community gathered to learn about this special resource that celebrates Nebraska's diverse literary landscape. Professor and CDRH Co-Director Kay Walter said, "Nebraska Authors is making the literature of Nebraska widely visible. It has been a pleasure to participate in this project with the Lincoln City Libraries."

Librarians featured on national podcast

In fall 2017, University Libraries Professors Jennifer Thoegersen and Kiyomi Deards were awarded the Against the Grain (ATG) Media Up and Comers Award. The award is given to library professionals who are new to the field and passionate about the future of libraries.

ATG Media recently launched an insightful podcast that features interviews with the Up and Comers and Thoegersen and Deards were included in the first two episodes.

• Thoegersen ATG Media podcast episode
• Deards ATG Media podcast episode

Take a few minutes to tune and listen to these wonderful interviews.

Exhibit at Love Library celebrates African Poetry

Students use the AR technology on the APBF exhibit

Don't miss this wonderfully informative exhibition about the history of the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF), which is spearheaded by Kwame Dawes, Chancellor’s Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of the Prairie Schooner.

The exhibit was curated and designed by University Libraries Professor Lorna Dawes and boasts exciting new Augmented Reality technology that makes it interactive and brimming with information. The simple yet elegant frames for the exhibit were designed by McArthur Genius Fellow Walter Kitundi.

This is the first leg of what will be a world-wide tour as the APBF exhibit accompanies the African Poetry Symposia, a public series traveling around the world that features dialogue, lectures, and exchanges about major themes and developments in African poetry. After leaving UNL, the exhibit and Symposia series will travel to the Library of Congress in DC, and then to Oxford University in the UK.

The APBF exhibit is on display through May 4, on the second floor of Love Library North. 

University Libraries professors establish and promote African poetry libraries

The African Poetry Book Fund (APBF), founded and directed by renowned poet and UNL Professor of English Kwame Dawes, promotes African poetry in a variety of ways, including the creation of 5 poetry libraries in African countries. University Libraries Professors Lorna Dawes and Charlene Maxey-Harris were instrumental in establishing these libraries, by creating online catalogs, authoring a manual for daily operations, creating procedures for the libraries to report back to UNL, securing book donations, and more.

The African Poetry Libraries project is one of the ways the University Libraries brokers global access to knowledge and resources. Charlene says of the initiative, “We are proud of the African Poetry Libraries project because it has expanded our reach outside of Nebraska to make a global impact on scholars and writers.”


Lorna and Kwame secured a Ford Foundation Grant to further the reach of the APBF by creating the African Poetry Digital Portal, an online index to African poetry, primary documents, and related materials. Lorna will coordinate the collections included in the index and partner with the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) to produce and manage the portal. The CDRH’s Karen Dalziel and Laura Weakly are creating the portal.

Visitors browse at the African Poetry Library-Kenya 2015

Lorna and Charlene continue to promote the African Poetry Libraries project through scholarly publications, conference presentations, and a new initiative “that develops future poets and establishes spaces for poetry readings,” Lorna continues, “it is our vision that more academic libraries will create such spaces and collections to inspire and advance African poetry.”

In celebration of April as National Poetry Month, the University Libraries is hosting several events, one that includes an APBF exhibit curated by Lorna. The exhibit offers a retrospective of the first five years of the APBF and made its debut on April 3 on the second floor of Love Library North. The exhibit opening included a special poetry reading event hosted by Kwame Dawes.

The University Libraries Diversity Committee is a co-sponsor of this exhibit and Kwame expressed that the group has, "done well by the event…Diversity enhances and enriches the intellectual capacity of our institution through excellence and innovation and this exhibit (along with our wonderful reading event) epitomizes this value perfectly.”

The exhibit will be on display until May 4 and will then make several stops in this country and abroad, including at the Library of Congress and Oxford University.

Jewell reflects on recent Nebraska Lecture

Professor and Willa Cather Scholar Andrew Jewell

When I was asked to give the spring 2018 “Nebraska Lecture” to talk about my research on the American author Willa Cather, I pretty quickly knew that this talk would give me an opportunity to reflect on why I do what I do. Such a reflection can be daunting, but I saw it as a chance to articulate some underlying values that drive my work. And I hoped that what I had to say would resonate with all who work in libraries and seek to promote learning and provide access to the cultural record. In a way, I used my work on Willa Cather as a microcosm for the larger effort of libraries everywhere to curate and publish resources of value.

My lecture, titled “Our Cather Heritage,” draws on a remark from poet John Neihardt, who dedicated a memorial to Willa Cather in 1962 with, in part, these words: “it is for us, the living, and for the living who shall follow us, generation after generation, that we set this Willa Cather Memorial against the flowing years, lest we forget the precious heritage that is ours through her.”

My talk seeks to identify what that “precious heritage” is, and, in identifying it, explain why our continued attention on the life and work of this author is worthwhile. I picked five elements of this inheritance, what I called in my lecture “values or realizations that have been learned or reinforced by my study of Willa Cather.” They are:

1. Diverse Cultural Practices Enrich Our Lives
2. Our Lives are Embedded in Communities
3. Beauty and Meaning Are There, If Only We Can See It
4. “Learn more or less all the time”
5. Have the “Courage to be honest and free”

I hope you’ll take a few moments to watch the lecture in the video below, as in it I explain the five different inheritances and use examples from Cather’s work and life to detail how she communicates these realizations. If you watch it, I hope you also notice where it all begins for me: with gratitude for the terrific team of people I get to work with in the University Libraries.

Andy Jewell
April 4, 2018

Further Reading and Resources:

• Nebraska Lectures
• Nebraska Today Related Stories
• Lecture Video Link