The poets featured on Poetry from the Plains: A Nebraska Perspective all address robust regional understandings of contemporary life in the Great Plains.  Their poetry explores the cultural and geographical experience of thoughtful living in this region.  The Great Plains as a whole is made up of a number of distinct bioregions, each with its own history of agriculture, ranching, and human settlement.  The region is also home to a complex array of human populations given the many, ongoing waves of migration and outmigration over the centuries.  Nebraska is located somewhere close to the middle of the geographic Great Plains, and fully participates in the human and natural history of the region.  The political boundaries of the state of Nebraska, of course, aren’t the same as the biological boundaries of the land itself or the cultural boundaries of the many people who live in the region.  Poetry from the Plains is more interested in the cultural and biological experience of living in the region than in the relatively arbitrary political boundaries of the state itself.

The featured poets were selected because their work explicitly addresses an important approach to regional experience.  The featured poets all:

• Are directly tied to Nebraska and the Great Plains, having lived here for significant periods of their lives;
• Center their poetry explicitly in cultural and/or bioregional experiences of a defined resident population on the Great Plains;
• Connect their poetry to active traditions of poetic expression in the region; and
• Have received national recognition for their poetry.

The featured poets were chosen by the directors of this website after consultation with the site advisory board. The advisory board meets annually.