Just in time for holiday family get-togethers and story-sharing, this presentation focuses on the ways writers can use family stories and history to write literature. Sometimes the voices in our heads are enough. Sometimes we need to look beyond the boundaries of self to find the best that is within us. This presentation discusses the ways to excavate history, both our own and the world’s, as a way to finding the true stories only we can write.

Karen Gettert Shoemaker is the author of the novel The Meaning of Names (Red Hen Press, 2014) and Night Sounds and Other Stories (Dufour Editions, 2002; UK edition – Parthian Press, 2006). She has published stories in the Prairie Schooner, the London Independent, The South Dakota Review, Fugue, Kalliope, and others. Her stories and poems have been anthologized in A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers; Times of Sorrow/Times of Grace; An Untidy Season; and Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of Poetry.

She has received fellowships to Brush Creek Ranch Artist Colony and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She is the recipient of a Nebraska Center for the Book Award for Fiction; two Independent Artist Fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council, and a Nebraska Press Award for Feature Writing. She is a faculty mentor with the University of Nebraska MFA in Writing Program.

FREE and open to the public.