March 16, 2023: Readings and music by Marcia Forecki, Rex Walton, and Shoshana Sumral. 

Featuring:

A native of Kansas City, MO, Marcia Calhoun Forecki’s memoire about her son’s deafness, Speak To Me was published by Gallaudet University Press. She studied at the University of Nebraska’s MFA program. Her short stories have been published in literary journals including The Bellevue Literary Review, Eclectica Magazine, Sepia Quaterly, copperfieldreview.com, the writelaunch.com, and she serves as a contributing editor to Fine Lines literary journal. Marcia collaborated with film producer/director, Gerald Schnitzer, on the medical thriller Blood of the White Bear, a finalist for the Willa Award. Current projects include a new novel and serving on several committees at Larksong Writers Place.

A poet and longtime member of the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association (NLHA), Rex Walton worked with aspiring writers in the "Writers Write!" program through the NLHA. He organized “Poetry at the Moon,” a weekly series at Crescent Moon Coffee in Lincoln hosting over 400 readings with many writers from across Nebraska and Iowa. In 2015, Rex and Tom Franti began a weekly writing class at the Feast Program of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, a transition program for prisoners. 

Beginning in January 2016, Rex managed a new monthly Songwriter/Writer series at Mo Java Café in the University Place area of Lincoln. He also organized a monthly reading and workshop series at Red Path Gallery in Seward. He currently heads up the Third Thursdays reading series at Larksong Writers Place, where he serves on a Larksong Board sub-committee known informally as the “committee of assisting in any way humanly possible.”
Rex also has worked in two different writing groups at the Nebraska State Penitentiary.

Shoshana Sumrall is originally from rural West-Central Nebraska, now living in Lincoln. She is the author of the dark urban fantasy novel Weatherbone, and is hard at work on its sequel. In her career as a technical writer, she's written about everything from voting systems, to lab instruments, to wastewater management equipment. Her work is still closely followed in treatment plants worldwide. In the 90's, she was a bassist/vocalist in a heavy metal band. After a long dry spell, she has recently started writing songs again. ww.shoshanasumrallfrerking.com

APRIL 20, 2023: Readings by Barbara Schmitz and Bonnie Johnson-Bartee

Barbara Schmitz taught writing and literature at Northeast College for thirty years and initiated and ran the Visiting Writer Series there plus the student magazine Voices Out of Nowhere. Two of her books have won the Poetry Award from Nebraska Center for the Book and she is a recipient of an Individual Artist award from the Nebraska Arts Council. She's had two poems selected for American Life in Poetry, newspaper column initiated by Ted Kooser, and one "Uniforms" was also performed in the nude (by an acting troupe) during the Omaha Writing Festival. She has studied with John Neihardt, William Stafford and was an apprentice to Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University, helping him assemble his writing notebooks. She is the Poet of Highway 81 where she lives with husband Bob (What Bob Says--- Some More), writing to the sighing and whizzing of the traffic for over half her life. Latest Book: Sundown at Faith Regional (Pinyon), Bonnie Bartee, her reading partner, was a student in her Creative Writing class.

Bonnie Johnson-Bartee is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, Bildungsroman 38 (2004), Named, but Unknown (2006), and Cord Blood (Sandhills Press, 2022). She is also the editor of Teachers College: Essays on the Art of Education (WSC Press, 2007). Her work can be found in Words Like Rain (WSC Press, 2005) and editions of Voices Out of Nowhere, Judas Goat, and Nebraska Life. She teaches creative writing and literature courses at Wayne State College in Wayne, Nebraska, and at Northeast Community College in Norfolk, Nebraska, where she also serves as the director of the Visiting Writers Series and is the faculty editor of Northeast Community College’s annual student magazine, Voices Out of Nowhere. 

Bonnie grew up in northeast Nebraska, where she also raised her children, and her children are now raising theirs. A grandmother to six, she appreciates the deep roots of her Nebraska home. 

Past Third Thursday Readers:

February 23,2023: Featuring Adrian Loehring and Vince Learned

January 19, 2023: Featuring Editors and Contributors of The Good Life Review, including Shyla Shehan, Cat Dixon, Tacheny Perry, Michelle Pierce Battle, Tana Buoy, &  Annie Barker
December 15, 2022: Featuring poets Liz Kay, Sarah McKinstry Brown, and singer Pam Herbert Barger
November 17, 2022: Featuring novelist Brent Spencer and Karen Gettert Shoemaker
October 20, 2022: Featuring poets Matt Mason and Stacey Waite