Nebraska Authors

The artist grew up on the Mignery ranch near Bartlett, Nebraska, where his family has ranched for over 100 years. It was assumed he would be a rancher, but instead his childhood interest in drawing led him into a career in art. He was employed as an illustrator in the army and on leaving the army in 1963, he began a career in commercial art. He would pursue a parallel career in the fine arts, and eventually he devoted himself entirely to the fine arts. An experiment with casting bronze sculpture in 1973 led him to pursue a career as a sculptor. His knowledge of working ranch life and his interest in the history of the West have guided his very successful career as a sculptor in bronze, specializing in working cowboys, ranch hands and their horses. He has numerous bronzes in private, corporate and public collections around the country. Some of his sculptures may be seen in Central Park Mall in Omaha, and he has also donated bronzes to the town of Bartlett, Wheeler County, Nebraska. His sculpture for the Neihardt Center in Bancroft Nebraska shows the poet John Neihardt taking notes during his interviews with Black Elk on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1931.

Mignery continues to draw, with works including book illustrations, calendar artwork, greeting cards and other media, and a series of comic cowboy cartoons that have appeared regularly in Western Horseman magazine since 1985.

Heritage Room collections include a small bronze by Mignery, "The Blizzard of '88."

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Martin Emil Marty is the author of more than fifty books on religion in the United States, and the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His work in Lutheran theology and church history broadened into a career that has seen him become one of the most influential historians of modern Christianity, and a world renowned scholar, educator, author, and theologian.

Marty has served as president of the American Academy of Religion, of the American Society of Church History, and of the American Catholic Historical Association. These posts illustrate the breadth of his scholarly influence. At the University of Chicago he taught in the Divinity School, the Department of History, and the Committee on the History of Culture from 1963-1998.

He served as Co-Director of a study of World Fundamentalism, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and funded by a $2 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1988. The project continued from 1988 to 1994 and led Marty to the study of global inter-religious encounters.

Marty served as a Lutheran pastor in the Chicago area before entering into his career as a scholar.

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Marjorie Saiser is the author of eight volumes of poetry. She has won critical recognition, including an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Vreelands Award, the Nebraska Literary Heritage Award, the Mildred Bennett Award for exceptional literary contributions, the Willa Award, and several Nebraska Book Awards. She has co-edited two anthologies: Times of Sorrow, Times of Grace: Writing by Women of the Great Plains (with Lisa Sandlin and Greg Kosmicki, and Road Trip: Conversations with Writers (with Shelly Clark). Her novel-in-poems, Losing the Ring in the River, served as the basis for Brigid Amos's play of the same title, produced in 2018 by the Angels Theater Company at the Johnny Carson Theater in Lincoln.

Student of Bill Kloefkorn.

Ted Kooser has said that "no contemporary poet is better at writing about love" than Saiser. - Kooser quoted from his column "American Life in Poetry," Lincoln Journal Star 1-15-2017.

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