Nevada's Trees Call Out to Us

By Valerie P. Cohen

Valerie Cohen created the cover art for the 2023 Nevada Humanities’ Nevada Day card.

The trees of the Great Basin speak to us, Juniper, Pinyon, Bristlecone, and Limber Pines. These trees hold within their forms a long history of fortitude in the face of change. How to celebrate their venerable forms? Scientists pay their own kinds of attention. I respond by reading their gestures, drawing many portraits, trying to catch their surprising expressions. One must spend a long time with these trees to hear what they have to say. We listen, as well as we can.

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Christianna Shortridge
Everything around it

By Stephanie Gibson

One of my earliest memories of artmaking was during a Grade 8 class assignment. The teacher placed a wooden rung chair on a table in the center of the room and instructed us *not* to draw it. Instead, he implored the class to draw “everything around it.”

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Christianna Shortridge
Mid-season

Fruit-heavy with pomegranate
hanging from a slender branch,
bending to the fig. A leaf-shadowed
mauve wall separates their oleander
and plum-lined yard from yours with
a string of party lights. When you squint,
they sparkle like a portal in a dune.

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Christianna Shortridge
This City of Visual Overload

By Sarah Calvo

Over the course of 10 years, my husband and I moved seven times around the country. In that time away, the sights were what we missed the most about Las Vegas. This is a city of spectacle and surprise wrapped in sparkling sequins. It has a reputation in every corner of the earth.

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Christianna Shortridge
Twilight

By Jane E. Olive

There is a softness in the twilight.|
Not the rude brilliance of sunlight
So piercing you cannot 
Face it as you drive.
There is an easing off the day’s effort,
A knowing that plans left undone
Wait for another day.

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Christianna Shortridge
Suppose you’re in a meadow

By Joanne Mallari 

This poem appears in the 2023 issue of The Meadow

and someone has hurt your heart. ­­
I’ll tell you what a therapist
told me, which is that ruminating
on the past breeds depression.
The light will not be more lovely
than it is now, on a winter morning,
when all the intensity of a summer
sunset fits into a few minutes
before 9am. Winter welcomes
a twin energy, like last night
when I drew Inanna’s card
from a deck of divine women.

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Christianna Shortridge
Mutual Belonging

By Isabelle Bellinghausen

Founded in 2016 to support the mission of the first Clark County Poet Laureate, Poetry Promise, Inc. is perhaps the first and largest community-based program for poets in Clark County, Nevada. We remain committed to uplifting and amplifying the voices of emerging writers from underserved communities and working poets as they hone their craft. We provide financial support, education, and stability as writers develop their voice.

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Christianna Shortridge
HEART / LAND

By Sidne Teske

Tuscarora, the town I call home, is plonked into the middle of Bureau of Land Management open range. Local ranchers have allotments where their cattle graze, and our town is located inside an allotment. At different times of year cattle wander through town at will: we people are the interlopers. This is their domain.

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Christianna Shortridge
Nevada History and Culture on the ONE

By Staff of Nevada Humanities

Want to learn about Nevada history and culture? Click on the ONE! The Online Nevada Encyclopedia (ONE) is a free and easy to use online resource about Nevada history and contemporary culture. This multimedia educational resource explores the history, politics, heritage, and culture of the Silver State. If you have access to the internet, you can dig deeper into all things Nevada at onlinenevada.org.

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Christianna Shortridge
Nevada Wildlife

By Justin Evans

This poem was originally published in the journal, Petroglyph.

Driving south in the pre-dawn Nevada desert
on a two-lane road, I measure the distance between
my car and oncoming headlights in heartbeats.

Close to the road two mares stand
casting dark shadows, sleeping with one leg
raised, ready for the run.

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Christianna Shortridge
Making a Splash at the National Book Festival

By Staff of Nevada Humanities

Two books that celebrate and educate about underwater creatures have been selected by Nevada Humanities, home of the Nevada Center for the Book, to represent the state at the annual Library of Congress National Book Festival, which will be held on Saturday, August 12, 2023, at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. This year’s book selections from Nevada celebrate the smallest creatures of the sea to the largest fish of our lakes and rivers: Nudi Gill: Poison Powerhouse of the Sea by author and illustrator Bonnie Kelso, and Chasing Giants: In Search of the World's Largest Freshwater Fish by Zeb Hogan and Stefan Lovgren.

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Christianna Shortridge
Flashes of Light: Vignettes from the Road

By GennaRose Nethercott

“If you come thiiiiiis way, we’ve got two thousand clowns.” Reeva’s eyes light up, a grin highlighting the gap left behind from a tooth she’s just recently lost. She’s six and isn’t afraid of anything—even the piles and piles of clowns lining every surface of her family’s novelty motel. Ragdoll clowns and porcelain figurines. Pennywises and hobo clowns. Jack-in-the-boxes and red-nosed puppets. This: her legacy.

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Christianna Shortridge
Superman

By Paul Michelsen
I shuffled the deck
Not playing cards or Tarot
but 59 cards, each representing
one of the Buddhist lojong slogans.

I picked number 59
which could be the first or last line
of an American-style haiku
with its five syllables.

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Nevada Humanities
Cuscuta denticulata

By Emily Hoover

Originally published in Waxing and Waning. The poem was selected as runner-up in the Tennessee Tempest Edition contest in 2021.

In springtime, rust-colored spiderwebs 
are woven across the Mojave like fishnet 

stockings draped on an open dresser. 
This desert dodder engulfs creosote bushes 

& sagebrush scrubs, an outstretched 
hand in the dark after a nightmare.

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From the Living to the Telling: Seeds Bloom

My grandmother lived her early years in Carlin, Nevada. In the 1920s, winters were cold enough to freeze the Humboldt River, and ice was harvested and loaded onto trains in the railyards of the Central Pacific Railroad, where her father (my great-grandfather) worked. She slept with a brick warmed from the fire to keep warm—“bricks the size of two books” wrapped in a cloth. As a young teen, her family relocated to Sparks for railroad work. She lived out the rest of her life in Reno and witnessed the American strides and trials of the next seven decades.

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Christianna Shortridge
Bloom with Nevada Humanities: Nurturing Growth and Unleashing the Power of Humanities in Nevada

Nevada is a state brimming with diverse cultures, rich history, and vibrant communities. In the heart of this flourishing tapestry lies an organization that has touched countless lives and allowed individuals to truly bloom through the transformative power of the humanities. Welcome to the Nevada Humanities fundraising campaign, aptly named Bloom with Nevada Humanities, where the seeds of knowledge, creativity, and empathy are sown, cultivating a community that celebrates the human experience.

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Christianna Shortridge