By Kathleen Kuo

As we settle into another Nevada summer, I fondly remember my move to Las Vegas from the Midwest in the summer of 2019, and the many sensory “firsts” of desert life I learned that year. I remember my apartment parking lot smelling of chocolate chip cookies baking on a sheet pan someone had left in their car; the next week that same car filled the air with the perfume of slowly roasting hot dogs (I make no recommendations as to the food safety of either of these preparations).

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By Scott Dickensheets

Hey, you’re old.

Tell me about it. I didn’t use to be. Then, suddenly, whammo. “Old age,” quoth James Thurber, “is the most unexpected thing that happens to a man.” True in my case.

Surely you had some inkling ...

Well, I don’t mean suddenly in a bodily sense. I’ve had crunchy knees since JV football, and my back has been 85 years old for a decade. No, the suddenness was more about, I dunno, headspace.

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By Lindsay Wilson

This year the river through the trees
has much legroom, but the ducks care nothing
of depth, or sandbags in piles by the doors,
or the old ex-cons who used to sit here watching
water slide into the Great Basin. Those men
loved words and the cigarettes you pretended
to smoke back then because of a woman.
Some days you want a story from an old man
who meant leaving when he said river,
and who believed in the currency of cigarettes.

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Begin playing as I leave a little late for work—
my girlfriend getting in the shower,
crying minutes ago, feeling overwhelmed.

The first song is a wordless tune about love
which I consider skipping as I coast down
Charleston Blvd. when a man and woman
too young, too clean, dart across the street from a 7-11.

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By Matt Malinowski

A brilliant red glow hung in the sky over the mountains to the north of Las Vegas as the Aurora Borealis put on a cosmic performance for one night only. This interstellar light show had locals and tourists looking away from the neon glitz of the Strip and up towards the stars. The aurora was a sight to behold and a rarity this far south— it was also a reminder of Nevada’s nuclear past and a looking glass into our atomic connections to the universe.

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By Sheila Bock

In 2016, I began conducting research on how graduating college students personalize their graduation attire, giving focused attention to the ways many graduates transform the tops of their graduation caps, or mortarboards, into sites of creative expression.

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By Lisa Gavon

Artist, builder, and renegade, Rolling Mountain Thunder exhibited ideas that encompassed cutting edge thought politically, environmentally, and spiritually. He was a modern advocate of individual freedoms, but operated on the assumption that the best part of life was lived with compassion for other human beings.

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By Julian Kilker

What work does photography involve? How can it document the world around us? Photographers have explored the intersections between the technologies at play and the humanity it can portray since the field’s beginning.

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By Jesse James Ziegler
Nevada Poetry Society Challenge Poem for March 2024
♾️

There aren’t enough hours in the day
Not enough moments in a life
Reflect 

Surrender to the obvious
Humbly plead your case to the wind
Lean in

Moments shared widen across time
Elongating experience
To feel

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When the bees swarm
around the lavender
you gently shush them

as you carefully part
the branches to free
the dried stalks, still

fragrant when their day
is done.

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By Petit Monstre

Odyssey of the artist, a blank canvas is where you started 

picked up a pen and the begin was actually the end of the old you, 

dearly departed. 

Now we have gathered here today not to lay rest to the soul but to set it free, strap on your seatbelt, things might get a lil unsettling. 

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By Dustin Howard

Reno has been my adopted home for six years now, and in those six years, I’ve developed a true love for the beauty of the untamed West and the drama of the natural landscapes around us. The history of our state, and indeed, our country, is a brutal one. We are born from war–even Nevada’s state motto, “Battle Born,” acknowledges this provenance.

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By Courtney Cliften

The smell of wet dirt and onions from the Perry Farm
constricts the entire town with undistributed wealth,
masks the crystal, chemical-mixture stink
from tiny apartments chalked throughout the streets.
Children ride bikes down Main street
to buried jars of coins saved for hot summer days…

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By Donald M. Scott

In April MGM+/Amazon Studio will begin filming a mini-series version of George R. Stewart’s ecological novel, Earth Abides—a milestone in the rediscovery of the pioneering ecological author who was inspired by Nevada.

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By Sally Denton

A year ago, I returned home to Nevada after many years in New Mexico. I came to Reno seeking answers to a serious health issue, and I found the medical specialists who helped save my life. I am a third-generation Nevadan born in Elko, raised in Boulder City, and educated at the University of Nevada, Reno.

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By Ann M. Wolfe

My colleague Pamela Chadwick and I were approaching Middlegate, headed east on Highway 50 to visit an artist in eastern Nevada. For at least a few years at this point, we had been immersed in research for the exhibition that would become Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada. Suddenly, Pam yelled, “Stop!” There it was, just north of the highway: Fairview Peak. The mountain was immediately recognizable as the one in Dixon’s 1935 painting, Elements of Nevada.

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By Hue Chen

Back in 2022, I got to meet Richard and Astrid, members of the Esmeralda High Desert Institute (EHDI) in Goldfield, Nevada. Astrid and I met online when I blurted out on a Nevada Arts Council discussion panel about how it’s important to just start making the community spaces you want to exist here in Nevada, even if you don’t know what you’re doing.

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By Candace Garlock

Dear Friend,

I feel like I can call you my friend since you are reading this short letter that is now in your computer. As my friend, you will connect to my story of living in that “other” land, that space of illness that we all venture into during our lives; some for a short time, but for many it’s a permanent address.

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By Jeannie Hua

When you google “Lunar New Year,” you would see that for 2024, it’s February 10, when the first new moon of the lunar calendar year reveals itself to us. This is the Year of the Dragon based on the 12-year cycle of the Chinese zodiac.

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Por Genevy Machuca

Hola a todos, mi nombre es Genevy Machuca y estoy encantada de compartirles el emocionante inicio de mi viaje de pasantía con Nevada Humanities. Como estudiante de primer año en la Universidad de Nevada, Reno, estudiando dos carreras, una en periodismo televisivo y la otra en español, mi camino hacia esta increíble oportunidad comenzó con una pasión por la poesía y hablar en público.

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