Award-winning novelist and Pearl S. Buck Writer in Residence to read work at next Visiting Writers event

Karen Gettert Shoemaker

The second event in Randolph’s Visiting Writers Series this fall will feature Karen Gettert Shoemaker, the College’s Pearl S. Buck Writer in Residence. The reading will take place Wednesday, October 24, at 8 p.m. in the Alice Ashley Jack Room in Smith Memorial Building, and is free and open to the public.

Shoemaker is the author of the novel, The Meaning of Names (Red Hen Press, 2014), the One Book, One Nebraska selection for 2016 and Omaha Reads selection for 2014. Her award-winning collection of short stories, Night Sounds and Other Stories, was published by Dufour Editions in 2002, and re-published in the United Kingdom by Parthian Press in 2006.

Her fiction and poetry have been published in a variety of newspapers and journals, including The London Independent, Prairie Schooner, and South Dakota Review. Her work has been anthologized in A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers; Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of Poetry; Times of Sorrow/Times of Grace; and An Untidy Season.

Shoemaker is a graduate of the University of Nebraska, where she received a bachelor’s degree in journalism, and both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in creative writing. Awards for her writing include a Nebraska Press Association Award for Feature Writing, two Independent Artist Fellowship Awards from the Nebraska Arts Council, and a Nebraska Book Award for Short Fiction.

She has taught creative writing and literature classes for more than 20 years and is currently a faculty mentor with the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program. She is the founder and director of Larksong Writers’ Place Workshops.