Nebraska Authors

Ernie Chambers is an African-American State Legislator who served a 38-year term in the Nebraska State Legislature representing the 11th District in Omaha, ended by new term limits in 2009. He later returned for another full 2 terms in the Legislature. Chambers is the longest-serving state senator in the history of Nebraska. He ran for a position on the Omaha School Board, but did not get elected. He also failed as a write-in candidate for the City Council. He is also the only African-American to have run for governor and the U.S. Senate in Nebraska's history. Chambers is famous for poetry on political topics, biting political speeches, and command of legislative procedure. Much of his poetry was handed out in the form of broadsheets in the legislative chamber at the State Capitol.

Chambers is a towering figure in the history of his Omaha community, and in the history of the Nebraska State Legislature. Omaha native Tekla Agbala Ali Johnson has written a political biography of Chambers: Free Radical: Ernest Chambers, Black Power and the Politics of Race. 2012.

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Cheryl Ludwigs, who writes under the pen name of Cheryl St. John, borrowed from her mother’s maiden name, is a best-selling author of historical and contemporary romance fiction. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska. Rain Shadow, her first novel, was nominated for the Romance Writers of America’s RITA Award, Romantic Time’s Best Western Historical, and Affaire de Coeur’s Best American Historical Romance. In 2005, her novel His Secondhand Bride was also nominated for another RITA Award. Many of her Special Editions have been included in Waldenbooks Top Ten. Land of Dreams, The Magnificent Seven and Prairie Wife have all won the Romantic Time’s Reviewers Choice Awards. Her anthology, Big Sky Brides, got to #35 on The New York Times list, and her stories have been published in over a dozen languages. Publishers include Harlequin.

Author profile and review appear in March 1994 magazine Romantic Times. Past President, Romance Authors of the Heartland.

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He had an interesting and somewhat improvisational career. He began his career painting cattle portraits for proud farmers and stock breeders. In about 1897 he joined the Campbell Brother's Circus, a large, nationally known circus which had winter quarters in Fairbury, Nebraska. There, for a decade, he painted circus posters, circus wagons and also worked as a clown. He left the circus in 1907 and settled in Lincoln, Nebraska. He painted backgrounds for Vaudeville, and many theatrical backdrops in Lincoln and around the region. He painted murals for public buildings and churches.

Among his best known murals was a panoramic view of the United States stretching around the walls of an auto dealership at 14th and Q Streets in Lincoln. In the 1930s Manrose, working for the Works Progress Administration, painted portraits of Lincoln's public libraries. In 1981 this artwork was restored by local artist Lynn Boyer and hung in the libraries and library offices. The largest of these, a 2-by-3 1/2-foot portrait of the main city library built in 1902 and demolished in 1961 shows the library as it was known to Lincoln residents like Loren Eiseley and Mari Sandoz. It still hangs near the library offices. In the 1950s, just before he died in 1957, Manrose painted backgrounds for display windows at Ben Simon's and Hovland-Swanson's department stores in Lincoln.

Manrose is listed in Susan V. Craig, Biographical Dictionary of Kansas Artists (active before 1945). 2009.

Nebraska Author Gertrude Campbell Wehling contributed to a history of the Campbell Circus: see Ed Bardy, Tales from a tent : story of the Campbell Bros. Circus : the canvas that covered the plains. 1981. In HR

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