Across the Sandhills: Words and Music
By Randall Snyder and Roy Scheele
"Across the Sandhills" is a song cycle of seven poems that draw their imagery from the artists' personal responses to Nebraska. Poet and composer will comment on the interactive process of the art song; they will discuss both the feeling and structure of the poems and the complex musical style of the songs. Questions and reactions to the performance follow.

Antonia's Czech Tulip Quilt
By Antonette Willa Turner
The granddaughter of immigrant Annie Pavelka, featured in Willa Cather's "My Antonia," describes the quilt her grandmother made using brightly printed feed sacks and dressmaking cuttings. Turner tells the story behind the quilt and what it illustrates about her grandmother and about immigrant life in Nebraska in the early 20th century.

Bess Streeter Aldrich: Biography
By Carol Miles Petersen
Petersen, Bess Streeter Aldrich's biographer, explores the writer's life and career in this program. From 1899 to 1950, Aldrich wrote and sold more than 100 short stories. Through books that depict rural life, she also recorded the cultural and historic heritage of Nebraska.

Hell on Women and Horses
By Lyn Messersmith
Lyn Messersmith's poetry mixes with historical and cultural insight to form a program that is personal as well as collective. Messersmith's views on the landscape and loneliness, as well as the joyful and humorous events that spark ranch life, lead the audience on a journey that follows the quest of Western women for identity, spirituality and a sense of place. 

Introduction to Nebraska Authors
By Laureen Riedesel
This program consists of readings from six Nebraska authors, with a short biography of each author and an introduction to each piece. Readings and authors include Mari Sandoz's "Winter Thunder," Willa Cather's "My Antonia," Wright Morris' "Will's Boy," John G. Neihardt's "All Is But a Beginning," Bess Streeter Aldrich's "A White Bird Flying" and Loren Eiseley's "All the Strange Hours."

Kate M. Cleary: Nebraska Writer and Humorist
By Susanne George Bloomfield
Many people are familiar with Nebraska women writers Mari Sandoz, Willa Cather and Bess Streeter Aldrich, but few know that other women were successfully writing and publishing in Nebraska at the turn of the century. Kate M. Cleary moved as a bride to the new town of Hubbell in 1884, where she had six children and wrote stories and poems about the West. Many of her humorous satires on society and frontier life were published in national magazines and newspapers. George, Cleary's biographer, traces the author's life, pays tribute to her "rural-urban vision" from a prairie village and discusses her contribution to American literature.

My Babicka, Antonia
By Antonette Willa Turner
It was Willa Cather who taught English to the immigrant Annie Pavelka and who later captured the young Czech woman's strength and spirit in "My Antonia." Turner, Pavelka's granddaughter, describes the friendship between Cather and her grandmother, tells stories, shows artifacts and inspires her young audiences to read Cather's works.

Nebraska: Crossroads of the Western Fur Trade
By Darrel W. Draper
This humorous, one-hour presentation, composed from literature, is an entertaining and amusing summary of the history of the fur trade, including trading companies, personalities and the achievements of fur traders and mountain men who lived in or passed through Nebraska. This tabloid-style review of the oddities and ironies of the industry has been carefully researched but is humorously presented in a sensationalized style. It recounts some of the bizarre happenings that resulted in the most important discoveries of land and routes enabling the U.S. to claim and populate the West.

Nebraska Through Song and Story
By Dan Holtz
Nebraska has not only a rich tradition in literature but also a rich, less-publicized tradition in music. This program interweaves songs, accompanied on guitar and harmonica, with excerpts from works by Willa Cather, John Neihardt, Mari Sandoz and Bess Streeter Aldrich. In a narrative from about 1850 to 1904, it tells the stories of the people who came to and through early Nebraska, the pioneers who crossed the overland trails, the settlers and the Native Americans. This program can be tailored for either a young audience or an adult audience. 

O the Stories We Tell: Did That Really Happen?

By William Kloefkorn

All of us have stories to tell, and some of us, for a variety of reasons, would like to commit our stories to the page in some form of memoir. But all of us have memories that are less than perfect, or memories that recall more than we believe we should tell. So what do we do? In "Restoring the Burnt Child," Bill Kloefkorn tried to tell the truth and believes that he did--mainly. Even so, sometimes truth and fact and appropriateness do not mesh very comfortably. Should that prevent us from telling our stories? Kloefkorn hopes not.

Speaking of Ella Deloria

By Joyzelle Gingway Godfrey

Deloria wrote the book “Waterlily” and the anthropology companion textbook “Dakota Way of Life” based on the extensive Sioux elder interviews she began compiling in the early 1920s and from her own knowledge as a Dakota woman raised among and with family ties to Lakota families. This presentation is about the woman and her work.

Wright Morris: Small-Town Life Through the Eyes of a Nebraska Writer
By Nancy B. Johnson
Wright Morris often questions if the images of his boyhood as they appear in his works are real or imaginary. Many of the real images he writes about can be seen in early 20th-century photographs of Central City, Nebraska. In this presentation, these photos and more recent photos of artifacts described by Morris are paired with narrative passages from his works. Johnson uses images and words to create a picture of small-town Nebraska life as experienced by the writer.

Willa Cather and Quilts
By Evelyn Haller
Willa Cather's earliest memory of art was sitting under quilting frames as a child. This early experience of art as craft — listening to stories and looking at thoughtfully arranged materials of everyday life — remained with Cather. Throughout her life Cather chose to work in places that recalled the small space under the quilting frame, including the attic room in her Red Cloud home, the attic sewing room Isabelle McClung prepared for her in Pittsburgh and the tent where she wrote in Grand Manaan. Slides illustrate quilts Cather names in her fiction as well as related Cather sites and materials.

Willa Cather's Life in Letters

By Andrew Jewell

Drawing on Cather's extensive correspondence, particularly the letters in the UNL Archives and Special Collections, this talk explores the way Cather used letters to communicate her ideas, maintain her relationships, and think through her life and experiences. Cather forbid the publication of her letters, so this features lively, but largely unread texts of the great American author.

Willa Cather's My Antonia: The Story Behind its Writing and Publication

By Andrew Jewell

Drawing on biography, history, photographs, interviews, and archival materials, this presentation tells the story of the creation of Willa Cather's great novel “My Antonia”, a book with a long foreground in the author's life, and, as recently-discovered letters illustrate, one that marked daring new ambitions and achievements in her career.

Wright Morris: Nebraska Novelist and Photographer
By Joseph J. Wydeven
Wright Morris (1910-1998) was both a writer and a photographer.  This presentation focuses on Morris’s work in both media, particularly those works he called his photo-texts, including The Home Place (1948) and God’s Country and My People (1968). Some attention is also given to his best novels, Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960) and Plains Song for Female Voices (1980).  This appreciative and richly illustrated program should appeal to a wide variety of audiences.