Poet Traci Brimhall reading at UNK’s Frank Museum

KEARNEY – Poet Traci Brimhall is the next featured reader in the University of Nebraska at Kearney’s Reynolds Visiting Writers Series.

Brimhall will read selections from her work 7 p.m. Thursday (Nov. 8) at the G.W. Frank Museum of History and Culture on the UNK campus. The event is free and open to the public.

An associate professor in the department of English at Kansas State University, Brimhall is the author of “Saudade,” “Our Lady of the Ruins,” which was selected by Carolyn Forché for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and “Rookery,” which won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and was a finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. She collaborated with Brynn Saito on the chapbook “Bright Power, Dark Peace,” and her poetry has been anthologized in “Best American Poetry 2014.”

“Ghosts lurk in Traci Brimhall’s work. The dead, the remembered, the past – they watch us live,” said Brad Modlin, the Reynolds poetry chair in the UNK Department of English. “Whether it’s a poem about love, Brimhall’s Brazilian grandparents during political upheaval or surviving a mythical apocalypse, history and magic breathe into her words.”

Brimhall, the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and Prairie Schooner Jane Geske Award through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College and doctorate from Western Michigan University.

Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Believer, Slate, The New Republic and Ploughshares.

UNK’s Reynolds chair professorship and Visiting Writers Series are supported by an endowment from Paul and Clarice Reynolds.