Mark Sanders, Poetry Papers

Born in Creighton, Nebraska, in 1955 and raised on the eastern rim of the Sandhills near Ord, Nebraska, Mark Sanders is a poet, essayist, story-writer, editor, and publisher. Sanders received his BA and MA in English from Kearney State College (now the University of Nebraska at Kearney) in 1976 and 1979 respectively, and his PhD in English emphasizing in Modern Poetry in 1989 from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Sanders received a second PhD in Higher Education Leadership in 2013 from the University of Idaho. Sanders has published many chapbooks of poetry, full-length collections of poetry, and edited volumes devoted to Nebraska poets. Sanders' creative work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including the Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, River Teeth, Shenandoah, Poetry East, the Poetry Foundation website, The Midwest Quarterly, and many more. Sanders has published more than 500 individual poems. Sanders has taught in Nebraska high schools, at Southwest Missouri State University, Tarkio College, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Kearney State College, Nebraska Wesleyan University, Southwestern Oklahoma State University, College of the Mainland, Lewis-Clark State College, and Stephen F. Austin State University. In 2007, Sanders received the Mildred Bennett Award from the Nebraska Center for the Book for fostering Nebraska's literary heritage and he won the Nebraska Book Award in 2016 for A Sandhills Reader: Thirty Years of Great Writing from the Great Plains, a retrospective of his publishing imprint, Sandhills Press, which has been in operation since 1979.