Nebraska Authors

Matt Mason has organized poetry programming with the State Department in Nepal, Romania, Botswana, and Belarus. He has over two hundred publications with numerous honors including a 2013 Pushcart Prize for his poem “Notes For My Daughter Against Chasing Storms.”

Mason has been appointed Nebraska State Poet, 2019-2023, (succeeding Twyla Hansen).

Mason is well known as an advocate for poetry. He serves as executive director of the Nebraska Writers Collective, through which he promotes the Louder Than a Bomb: Great Plains Youth Poetry Festival (since 2011). He has served as board president of the Nebraska Center for the Book and has served as the Nebraska State Coordinator for Poetry Out Loud, a Poetry Foundation/National Education Association program. Mason founded and administers poetrymenu.com, the Nebraska poetry website, important for literary news and events statewide. He writes that "Galway Kinnell and slam poetry changed my life... I love poetry which entertains as well as it influences and touches..."

Mason's 2018 poem "The Start" was published by the New York Times in 2021, in response to violence that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.

Mason is the spouse of poet Sarah McKinstry-Brown.

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Knoll's parents graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1910. He served in the Army (in Japan) after earning his undergraduate degree and before attending the University of Minnesota's doctorate program. He came to the University of Nebraska in 1950. In 1969, Knoll started UNL's unconventional Centennial College program which lasted about a decade. He retired from the University of Nebraska in 1990.

Famed as a teacher and mentor, his book on Weldon Kees, Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation: Letters, 1935-1955, has been credited with remaking Kees's reputation as a poet and artist. He was a pioneer in understanding the work of Nebraska writer Wright Morris. Knoll's support for Bernice Slote and Sue Rosowski, and his work with the organizations of Cather and Sandoz, was important in revivals of interest in Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz.

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Distinguished ornithologist and bird illustrator George Miksch Sutton was born in Bethany, Nebraska, in 1898 while his father H.T. Sutton, a peripatetic minister and educator, taught Eloquence at Cotner College. The family moved to Minnesota in 1901, returned to Bethany in 1903 and remained through 1906, when Sutton's father was an unsuccessful Prohibition candidate for Nebraska governor. The family moved away in 1907, never to return.

Sutton's only further contact with Nebraska was when, at the age of 13, now living in Bethany, West Virginia, he took a mail-order Taxidermy course from the Northwestern School of Taxidermy in Omaha, Nebraska.

Sutton became Curator of Birds at Cornell University after obtaining his PhD there. He also had ties to a number of other institutions including the Carnegie Museum, he taught briefly the University of Michigan, and for a long time at the University of Oklahoma, from which he retired. His connections to other distinguished ornithologists were many, Sewall Pettingill was a lifelong friend, while in the army in World War II, he birded with Roger Tory Peterson and Franklin McCamey. He did field work in the Arctic, Texas, Mexico, and Iceland, among other places. He published many books, including a memoir Bird Student: An Autobiography, 1980, that recounts his career through 1935, when he left Cornell. The government of Iceland awarded him the Knight Cross Order of the Falcon in 1972 for his work in Iceland. He is remembered as a very successful fine artist, as well as a scientist.

Nebraska ornithologist Paul Johnsgard has assembled a 14 page bibliography of Sutton's publications A George Miksch Sutton Bibliography, which is available on-line via the University of Nebraska digital commons. Johnsgard has also given a stellar review to Jerome A. Jackson's scholarly bibliography George Miksch Sutton: Artist, Scientist and Teacher, 2007 (the review is also available via the UN digital commons).

The University of Oklahoma's George Miksch Sutton Avian Research Center has a more detailed on-line biographical sketch of Sutton by his biographer Jerome Jackson. See also Sooner Magazine, 12:1, Spring/Summer 1992.

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