Mark Sanders, who received his PhD in English from UNL, will read from his new collection of poetry, In A Good Time, on Tuesday, Sept 10, at 5 pm in the Bailey Library of Andrews Hall. Sanders recently won the Western Heritage Award for Landscapes, with Horses, in the category of Outstanding Book of Poetry for 2019. Sanders is a poet, creative essayist, fiction writer, and literary critic, with more than 500 publications appearing in journals in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and Canada. His short story, “Why Guineas Fly,” was selected as one of 100 outstanding short stories for 2007 by Stephen King in Best American Short Stories; his essay, “Homecoming Parade,” was selected as one of the outstanding works of the year in the 2016 edition of Best American Essays. His writing has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes more than a dozen times and been listed among the notable works in Pushcart. He has had poetry featured in American Life in Poetry, a syndicated series published by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, and on the Poetry Foundation website.

Among his other books of poetry are The Suicide (1988), Before We Lost Our Ways (1996), Here in the Big Empty (2006), and Conditions of Grace: New and Selected Poems (2011). Edited works include: On Common Ground: The Poetry of William Kloefkorn, Ted Kooser, Greg Kuzma, and Don Welch (with J. V. Brummels, 1983); Jumping Pond: Poems and Stories from the Ozarks(with Michael Burns, 1983); Three Generations of Nebraska Poets (with Stephen Meats, 2011); The Weight of the Weather: Regarding the Poetry of Ted Kooser (2017); and, A Sandhills Reader: 30 Years of Great Writing from the Great Plains (2015).

The Weight of the Weather won the 2018 Nebraska Book Award in the biography category, and A Sandhills Reader won the 2016 Nebraska Book Award for an anthology.

Sanders is the long-time editor of Sandhills Press, a small, independent press which he started in his small hometown in Nebraska in 1979. For his work in promoting the poetry of emerging and established Nebraska writers, he won the Mildred Bennett Award from the Nebraska Center for the Book in 2007 for fostering Nebraska’s literary heritage.

He is currently Associate Dean of the College of Liberal and Applied Arts at Stephen F. Austin State University at Nacogdoches, where he and his wife Kimberly Verhines operate a small farm.