 The 2020 Nebraska Book Awards will honor authors and publishers of books with a Nebraska connection published in 2019. The 2020 Nebraska Book Award winner for poetry was described by poet Stacy Waite as, while many of the poems in the collection reach back in time and mythology, the book could not be more essential and more poignant than it is right at this moment. The book is a retelling of the story of Persephone, Demeter, and Hades' engorgeously crafted poems. This Bright Darkness by Sarah McKinstry-Brown, published by Black Lawrence Press. Hello, first I want to say thank you so much to the Nebraska Center for the book for their continuous advocacy for literary arts. I so appreciate the work that you have done and continue to do to help support Nebraska writers and Nebraska presses. I also want to say thank you to the Kimmel-Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City. It was at a residency at the Kimmel-Harding Nelson Center for the Arts where I first began writing the poems for this Bright Darkness, the collection which has won this year's Nebraska Book Award. Having protected time and space and recognition of my work through that residency was huge for me and so I am so grateful to them and for what they do to make Nebraska look good in terms of the arts that's a world-class organization that brings in artists from all over the country and the world and so thank you Kimmel-Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. I want to acknowledge that while it is strange that we can't all be together in the same room, it feels really appropriate given the nature of the work that we do as writers. So much of the work that we do as writers is in isolation. It is invisible the work that we do from the first idea, the first drafts as we continue to work and revise and rewind and re-imagine. So much of that is invisible and done in solitude and what keeps us going I believe as writers is the knowledge of the other writers in the world and in our community, the fact of their presence through their books, their ideas, the lives that they've lived. That is what sustains us as we pursue our art. So I am not with you in person but I know that we are all always together in spirit and in work. I also want to acknowledge that writing this book was very difficult for many reasons and what enabled me to continue to press on and finish this collection is the support and love of course from my family, my dear, silly, wonderful, strong, supportive husband, my girls and the wonderful friends I have in the writing community here in Nebraska that has embraced me since I first set foot in Omaha in 2002. I was doing a spoken word poetry tour in 2002, took the Greyhound bus here and have been embraced by the writing community ever since then. Finally I am thinking of course of my parents who are both far away. I know right now all of us are thinking of our loved ones who we can't be with and so I want to thank them and acknowledge them. Their love for each other brought me into the world and when I think about what birthed my love for poetry and my pursuit of poetry, I know that it was my parents' empathy, imagination, their creativity, their love of music and you know my dad is a salesman and my mom was a nurse and their lives were poetry. They lived poetry and how they engaged with other people in the world and so thank you to them. Thanks again to the Nebraska Center for the book for acknowledging this bright darkness for the Nebraska Book Award and I hope you all you know stay safe and keep writing, pressing on. Describing the winner for poetry honor book, poet Marjorie Seizer says, here is an unblinking eye we can trust, a voice we can believe when Mark Sanders says, loveliness endures, even in grief, loss felt is never really loss but keeping. Our work like his may well include close observation of life and its ghosts. The book is In a Good Time by Mark Sanders, published by WSC Press. Hi everyone, this is Mark Sanders from Nacodotius, Texas currently, however just to make it clear for those of you who don't know me, I'm a Nebraska boy, was born and raised there, lived in the San Jills part of the country for a long, long while, was educated at Carnish State College and at the University of Nebraska and I will always be a Nebraska and so it's with the great pleasure that I'm taking part of this event today. I wish I could be on Lincoln, I wish I could be there but obviously we're going to be doing things a little bit differently this year. I want to say thank you to the Nebraska Center for the book for picking In a Good Time, my latest collection of poetry for the Poetry Honor Award. This book was published by Wayne State College Press and up there I have to thank Chad Christensen and J.D. Grommels for the work on the book and for their passionate diligence in getting the collection done back in 2019. The book was a result of about three or four years worth of writing poems and it was a considerable labor trying to come up with what we wanted to have for the final collection and you know it's something that I was very proud of and it was written in a good time and so the title of the collection comes from the fact that it was such a positive event for me. I want to thank Rod Wagner of the Nebraska Center for the book, he's been very supportive of me over the years and the Nebraska Book Award is a very significant thing for me. I truly appreciate it. I've had a few other awards along the way and the Nebraska Book Awards is an important thing for the writers of the state and I hope that it continues. I'd like to also thank my wife Kimberly who has done with me the long haul on all my poetry writing and she's done a bear, I'm not a work in supporting writers herself and you know she knows just how important this thing is to a poet like me and so you know thank you in behalf of a prayer too. To close off I'd like to read one poem from the book, this is called Still Life. The poem was originally published in the Midwest portal and that was later on reprinted in the New York Times and I think this is a poem that speaks well for all of us in the current age that we're living in, all the fears and concerns and anxieties that people have and so if this brings peace to anybody then I'm very happy that it has done so, the Still Life. Now just at that silent place between sadness and gratitude, when worn balances we all weather, the cardinal leaps from a bare-trimmed limb, its red bloom lingering, the sun down and deepening, darkness where night clouds consume it, evanescence of orange and purple, how moment passes, how memory holds, the heart must break if it has ever felt joy, the heart must break because diminished things matter and having mattered hold still, you were here for us, then break heart, your fingers lie upon the pulse of our days. Again, thank you so very much to Nebraska Center for the book and for the Nebraska Book Award. I truly appreciate it.