DON WELCH was a Nebraska native
and the author of numerous collections of poetry including Dead Horse Table (1975),
The Rarer Game (1980), A Brief History of Feathers (1996), Inklings: Poems
Old and New (2001), and Gutter Flowers (2005). He won many awards and honors,
including the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. A poet and educator, Welch was born in
Hastings,
and spent his early years roaming through small towns definitive of Nebraska, such as
Gothenburg and Columbus. Welch earned a Bachelor of Arts from Kearney State College (now
University of Nebraska at Kearney), a Master of Arts from the University of Northern
Colorado,
and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He began his career teaching English at
Fort Morgan, CO, then at Gothenburg High School. He also taught poetry writing to primary
and
secondary students through the Nebraska Arts Council. He continued his career in education
as
a professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney where he taught English and Philosophy
for fifty years as the Martin Distinguished Professor of English and the Reynolds Chair of
Poetry Professor, officially retiring from English in 1997 but continued teaching in
Philosophy until 2008. A volume of his writing, Homing: The Collected Poems of Don
Welch (2016 Rogue Faculty Press), won the 2017 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry, and is
available on Amazon.