Wishing you peace, blessings, and joy this holiday season.
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By Rossitza Todorova
Between Earth & Sky: Exploring the Great Basin Through the Eyes of Northern Nevada Artists is a vibrant group exhibition celebrating the unique high desert of Nevada’s Great Basin. Thirteen artists, including Galen Brown, Grace Davis, Gerald Lee Franzen, Ahren Hertel, Scott Hinton, Asa Kennedy, Kirsten Mashinter, Melissa Melero-Moose, Elaine Parks, Austin Pratt, Gail Rappa, Rachel Stiff, and Sidne Teske, employ diverse mediums such as painting, photography, sculpture, and mixed media to capture the landscape's expanse, fragmentation, and distinct vantage points.
By Mckenzie Papa
“If you think we panicked, if you think the event was canceled, if you think we didn’t have fun, if you think we were unprepared, if you think we struggled, not only might it show that you don’t fully understand Burning Man, but it may also mean that you're not ready for it. While friends and family were understandably worried due to the media spreading misinformation, we proved to each other how much we can strive when we stick together.”
By Phoebe Coogle
At the start of my first year at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), I went into a student worker interview knowing only that the position ‘literary editor’ seemed like something my English major self would enjoy.
By Staff of Nevada Humanities
Thank you for reading the Double Down Blog this year. We are grateful for you.
By Dr. Jennifer Verive
Finding new ways for college students to engage in metacognition – thinking about how and what one thinks – can be a challenge. This is especially so in my “Strategies for Academic Success” course. Often, this course does not gently invite contemplation, but instead demands self-reflection through a battery of psychological assessments, detailed time tracking, and relentless insistence on weekly To Do lists.
By Zeb Hogan and Stefan Lovgren
The collaboration that led to our book—Chasing Giants: In Search of the World’s Largest Freshwater Fish—goes back almost two decades. We first met in 2006 in Cambodia to start a National Geographic story series on The Megafishes Project, which was Zeb’s quest to find, study, and protect the largest freshwater fish species around the world.
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By Simon Hunt and Heather Lang-Cassera
Via the Humanities at Play virtual series, Nevada Humanities Program Manager Kathleen Kuo recently chatted with authors Simon Hunt and Heather Lang-Cassera about collaborative poetry. They explored the benefits and challenges of writing poems with other people. During the session, they compiled lines of verse from participants to create a collaborative poem!
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By Staff of Nevada Humanities
Visitors to the Nevada Humanities Program Gallery in Las Vegas this month will get behind-the-curtain views of rare drawings and designs created for an icon of Las Vegas—the showgirl.
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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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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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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.
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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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.
By Bonnie Kelso
On August 12, 2023, the Walter E. Convention Center in downtown Washington, D.C. hosted the National Book Festival! Before the doors officially opened, I found people lined up as neat as a library stack all the way around the corner, tote bags slung over their shoulders ready to be filled with exquisite treats, like bookish children on a Halloween night.
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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.
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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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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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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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.