By Deirdre Clemente
What can you do with $1,000?
I have an ex-boyfriend who spent $1,000 on a pair of rollerblades that he used two times before he gave them the Goodwill. My cousin paid $1,000 for a full-bred dog, who ate the toes out of all her socks. People spend $1,000 on bottles of champagne on the Vegas strip every single night. Others pay $1,000 for a psychic reading or baseball card or belt from Gucci. In the grand scheme of American life, it’s not a lot of money.
By Keith A. Brantley
Valley times like Death Valley Days.
We cannot count the ways
Our valley has changed.
We are estranged
from our less than humble beginnings.
Beginning with mob ties,
Our valley lies
Upon layers of mortar and bone.
Read MoreBy Joan Robinson
As long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with ruins. Maybe it started with that picture of my father as a college boy standing shirtless in the Coliseum, thumb pointing downward with the ruthless arrogance of a petulant Caesar. Or maybe it started with our family’s monthly visits to Detroit, already crumbling to ruin in the 1970s. Whatever started it, the Mojave Desert has offered me a wealth of atmospheric, tumble-down facades to explore from Rhyolite to Goldfield, to Nelson’s Techatticup Mine, and then just over the border to the Liberty Bell Arc. There are ghost towns and abandoned mines aplenty to explore.
Read MoreBy Scott Dickensheets and Geoff Schumacher
On October 17, 2019, Nevada Humanities and Huntington Press will release A Change Is Gonna Come: Reinvention in the City of Second Chances with a reception beginning at 6 pm and author readings at 7pm at the Clark County Library in Las Vegas. This anthology of essays, stories, and poems by Las Vegas writers is the tenth volume of Las Vegas Writes, an annual project of the Las Vegas Book Festival that highlights the community’s deep and sustaining literary talent pool and also program of Nevada Humanities.
By Tony Manfredi and Christina Barr
When President Johnson signed the National Arts and Humanities Act into law in 1965, no one envisioned the extent to which the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) would become embedded in our lives.
By Robert Chondro
Dear Norton Juster,
Before reading your book, The Phantom Tollbooth, I never really gave a care about life. To me, it was a blur; wake up, go to school, come home, and repeat. At home, I would rush through all my homework, finish it just so I could get it done. I always took the closest way to do anything, instead of choosing the way where I could actually learn something.
By Susanna Newbury
At 4 pm on Thursday, August 8, 2019, Justin Favela, Mikayla Whitmore, and Geovany Uranda loaded stacks of brightly painted tires into three cars and quickly drove northeast from Las Vegas’ Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. A short time later, they parked in an empty lot on Nellis Boulevard in the Sunrise neighborhood of East Las Vegas.
Read MoreBy Everett George
I used to think caring about stories was dangerous and could very much ruin your life. I was enrolled in online schooling for most of my teen years, which was real isolating and a solid way to lose friends. I’d read, I had liked stories a lot, they seemed to help, and stories encouraged me to get started on making my own. Which was going alright until around the time I turned 14 and my uncle died.
Read MoreBy D.K. Sole
Aware that the city where we live is often portrayed as a glossy, one-dimensional place, we looked into the museum collection for work that suggested the opposite—roughness, surprise, and contrast. Dry Wit: Artworks from the Collection of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art began to evolve.
Read MoreBy Lydia Huerta
The current political moment has made the physical border between the US and Mexico a protagonist with a life all of its own. In some cases, the news of the militarization, the violence, the migrant detention camps, the family separations, and the most recent targeted shooting of Mexicans in El Paso seem to make the border into a scene from a forthcoming apocalypse.
Read MoreBy Shaun T. Griffin
This morning, under warm sun, I weeded the roots of lavender, Chinese poppies, and the locust, an activity so benign it hardly merits mention, except of course, if it is aborted by the unwanted hands of justice. Almost every other week I go to the medium security prison to teach a poetry workshop.
Read MoreBy David Durham
When I decided to return to an academic career (after several years of being a full-time writer), I knew a job search could result in an offer anywhere in the country. A worrying thought. When I saw the University of Nevada, Reno’s (UNR) advertisement for a fiction faculty member to join the relatively new MFA program I knew I’d found my hoped-for, go-to destination.
Read MoreBy Staff of Nevada Humanities
Did you know that Nevada Humanities has an incredible educational and reference tool that delves into Nevada’s culture, history, and heritage? The Online Nevada Encyclopedia (ONE), which has been active since 2006, is a free, online resource that is available to anyone who is interested in learning more about the Silver State.
Read MoreBy Joanne Mallari
During National Poetry Month, I met Stephanie Gibson, who is a program manager at Nevada Humanities. When Stephanie invited me to curate a panel for the 2019 Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl, she asked me this question: How do you see poetry functioning out in the world?
Read MoreBy Angela M. Brommel
You can’t explain to friends from home how the desert makes it better, but you try:
Imagine a heat so dry that it presses down into the earth, releasing its scent so that it takes on the comforting smell of clay pots in your grandmother’s kitchen when you were a child,
Read MoreBy Kimberly Roberts
The invention of the automobile changed how Americans interacted with their landscape. Once confined to railroad tracks and wagon roads, the great American expanse was now open and available, and exploring by car signified a new freedom for those who could afford it.
Read MoreBy Bruce Isaacson
Even in the shadow of Casinosaurus
Life springs irrepressible from the sands
Artists, poets, lovers, children
Dream of the seventh gold city...
Read MoreBy Christina Barr
The seeds of Great Basin Young Chautauqua began in 1992 at the urging of a group of young people who saw their parents enjoying Nevada Humanities' newly formed Great Basin Chautauqua festival. Recognizing the program's value for young people, Nevada Humanities created the concept of Young Chautauqua and launched the Great Basin Young Chautauqua program in 1993.
Read MoreBy Kelli Luchs and Derek Weis
The recent designation of neon as Nevada’s official state element ensures that neon and Las Vegas will be forever linked. It was thus auspicious timing for the Neon Museum and the Las Vegas News Bureau to join forces to highlight some of the most iconic Las Vegas signs in their exhibit Then and Now: The Neon Boneyard,
Read MoreBy Deon Reynolds
A few years back, my wife Trish and I were commissioned to create several large-scale wheat paste murals for the Western Folklife Center’s National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada … we cooked up our own flour and water mixture to make the glue, which is applied to the wall, as well as over the art work itself. The images were printed on 24-inch-wide rolls of light-weight plotter paper.
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