Internationally acclaimed, award winning poet Kwame Dawes selects Stromsburg Public Library as one stop on his tour of 12 Nebraska libraries. Dawes, currently professor of English at the University of Nebraska and Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of the Prairie Schooner, an international quarterly literary journal, will entertain the public with poetry reading Saturday, December 15, at 11 a.m.

Marianne Kunkel, managing editor of the Prairie Schooner and also a published poet, will accompany Dawes. A question and answer session will follow the readings.

Dawes literary accomplishments as poet, editor, author, and playwright have earned him numerous prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emmy Award and the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award. Besides poetry, Dawes has written fiction, non-fiction, plays, Caribbean literature, African literature, and African American literature.

Dawes and Kunkel will promote Prairie Schooner, giving an update on the push to attract more international submissions, creating a podcast for the publication, a blog, and a revamped website. A new project called “Fusion” is underway. This is a multimedia collaboration involving poets and artists from such far reaching places as Botswana, Australia and the Balkans.

Learning more about Nebraska and its residents is one of the reasons for the December tour. The tour gives him the opportunity to find out how Prairie Schooner can support Nebraska’s literary arts.

His fondness for the journal is expressed in his comment: “Prairie Schooner is one of Nebraska’s greatest and most enduring gifts to the world, and it has been giving America so much for 86 years. I want to find as many ways to remind the people of the state about what a treasure we have and to see if we can generate even more ownership and pride in the publication,”

Written by Diana Johnson