Nebraska Authors

Tibbles came West in his teens to fight against slavery, often alongside John Brown, in "Bleeding Kansas." He served as a scout and guide in the Civil War, and after the war worked as a journalist in Omaha. In part at the hidden instigation of General George Crook, Tibbles shaped the events, even as he reported them, that led to the 1879 trial of the Ponca Chief Standing Bear that declared that an Indian is a person, giving Native Americans protection under the Constitution for the first time. After the death of his first wife he would marry (1882) Susette LaFlesche, who had been Standing Bear's interpreter at that trial.

Tibbles' 1881 book The Indian Ring: A Secret History of Its Power, Its Operations, Intrigues and Machinations was a deep account of Washington corruption and profiteering that would seem familiar to any modern writer on the Unaccountable.

Tibbles wore many hats, as a church leader, as a farmer, and as a writer. He was People's Party nominee for Vice-President of the United States (1904) Working for the Omaha Evening World Herald, he was the first journalist to file a factual report on the massacre at Wounded Knee in December, 1890.

Joe Starita describes Tibbles role in his 2009 book I Am a Man: Chief Standing Bear's Journey for Justice, and there is a good overview of Tibble's varied career in the publisher's preface to the 1957 re-publication of Tibbles's Buckskin and Blanket Days (original 1905).

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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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Dorothy was the sixth of ten children to Willard and Augusta Dodge Thomas. When Dorothy was seven, the family moved to Alberta, Canada, where they homesteaded near a logging company, often providing food and shelter to the loggers. The family moved back to Kansas when Dorothy was 12, and she attended school for the first time. A bright child, Dorothy showed immediate aptitude in writing stories and creating artwork, but always struggled with her other schoolwork. Other members of the Thomas family, especially Dorothy’s sister Kennetha, share Dorothy’s artistic strengths. Dorothy's mother Augusta moved her family to Bethany, Nebraska in 1914. Dorothy received her teaching certificate in 1918 and taught school throughout Nebraska for the next nine years. Her literary start came in Nebraska with the publication of one of her first stories in Prairie Schooner. Dorothy’s first publication was a poem entitled “The Beast Room,” which appeared in a 1927 issue. Selling her story “The Blue Doves” to Scribners in 1928 gave Dorothy the confidence to return her 1929 teaching contract unsigned: “sink or swim, I would risk everything, work at whatever jobs I could get, and write for my life and my living.”

The Heritage Room is the repository for Dorothy Thomas's literary estate.

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