Each year, artists across the state are recognized for their art and receive grant awards to further their work through the Individual Artist Fellowship program. This year’s category was literature.

The Nebraska Arts Council works to support the arts in Nebraska by building partnerships, promoting the importance and possibilities of the arts, and providing grant opportunities. One of its programs, the Individual Artist Fellowship (IAF), is an annual grant opportunity with a rotating set of three categories: visual arts, performing arts, and literary arts. Artists within the chosen category submit their work for consideration, and a professional panel evaluates the merit of the submissions.

Among the ten recipients announced this year, three UNO faculty and a UNO alumnus were selected for their impressive work.

Jody Keisner

Jody Keisner is currently working on her book, Runaway Mother, which is a collection of essays that investigate her questions on the expectations and realities of being a mother.

She explained, “I’m writing my book to understand the impulse women feel to be pregnant with a child and to understand not just the complexities of this fierce, unique love but also it’s dark underbelly: the ways mothers fail their children and the ways mothers run away from the enormity of the job or suffocate under it.”

Keisner is an associate professor of creative nonfiction at UNO. “My colleagues and students at UNO have always been supremely supportive of my work. I owe a great deal of gratitude to them.” Her essays in Runaway Mother garnered the attention of the IAF panel, who awarded her with the top grant amount of $5,000.

Carolina Hotchandani

Carolina Hotchandani was surprised and uplifted when she was selected for the IAF. She is working on a book, Spineless, a collection of poems from the perspectives of characters who are aware that they’re in a book, along with some poems from the perspective of an author wondering why she needs to write characters in order to face the issues in her own life.

“Although the concept that underpins Spineless may seem fantastical, the poems in this book use the idea of characters trapped in a novel as an allegory for the various oppressive systems that human subjects are constantly wrestling with,” she said.

Hotchandani is an assistant professor of English in UNO’s Goodrich Scholarship Program. She loves working with students from around the world; their fresh perspectives and resilience are constant sources of motivation. Hotchandani was awarded $2,500 through the IAF for her continued work on Spineless.

Caitlin Cass

Caitlin Cass uses her skills in visual art for her storytelling, creating comics and graphic novels. This is illustrated in her forthcoming graphic history Suffrage Song: The Haunted History of Gender, Race and Voting Rights in the U.S.

“This project explores how women worked to get voting rights from the civil war era to the civil rights movement. It also explores how history is written and why some stories get left out. It uses ghosts throughout as a way of confronting the unfinished business of this history,” Cass said.

Cass is an assistant professor of studio art, illustration, and time-based media at UNO. “I see teaching as a way to keep learning and participating in a lifelong conversation about how images communicate.” The IAF panel saw the merit of her work in Suffrage Song and awarded her $2,500.

Moisés Delgado

Moisés Delgado finds inspiration from the gossip that people share for his current project, a collection of short stories. One of these flash stories was featured in Split Lip Magazine: "The moon is a white corn tortilla, the night a sizzling comal, and the stars are parmesan cheese because God loves quesadillas with his nightly cafecito."

“It's a story about grief, Latinx identity, and sweets,” he said. “But also, in the way I am approaching this project as a whole, it's about gossip as community. My goal is for these stories to feel like you're sitting down with loved ones, gossiping over brunch.”

Delgado received a BA and BFA from UNO, and he contributes his gained confidence in writing to his time in UNO’s Writer Workshop and the support from his writing professors. He was awarded $1,100 from the IAF for his collection of short stories.