By Robert Chondro

Dear Norton Juster,
Before reading your book, The Phantom Tollbooth, I never really gave a care about life. To me, it was a blur; wake up, go to school, come home, and repeat. At home, I would rush through all my homework, finish it just so I could get it done. I always took the closest way to do anything, instead of choosing the way where I could actually learn something.

By Susanna Newbury

At 4 pm on Thursday, August 8, 2019, Justin Favela, Mikayla Whitmore, and Geovany Uranda loaded stacks of brightly painted tires into three cars and quickly drove northeast from Las Vegas’ Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. A short time later, they parked in an empty lot on Nellis Boulevard in the Sunrise neighborhood of East Las Vegas.

By Everett George

I used to think caring about stories was dangerous and could very much ruin your life. I was enrolled in online schooling for most of my teen years, which was real isolating and a solid way to lose friends. I’d read, I had liked stories a lot, they seemed to help, and stories encouraged me to get started on making my own. Which was going alright until around the time I turned 14 and my uncle died.

By Shaun T. Griffin

This morning, under warm sun, I weeded the roots of lavender, Chinese poppies, and the locust, an activity so benign it hardly merits mention, except of course, if it is aborted by the unwanted hands of justice. Almost every other week I go to the medium security prison to teach a poetry workshop.

By David Durham

When I decided to return to an academic career (after several years of being a full-time writer), I knew a job search could result in an offer anywhere in the country. A worrying thought. When I saw the University of Nevada, Reno’s (UNR) advertisement for a fiction faculty member to join the relatively new MFA program I knew I’d found my hoped-for, go-to destination. 

By Staff of Nevada Humanities

Did you know that Nevada Humanities has an incredible educational and reference tool that delves into Nevada’s culture, history, and heritage? The Online Nevada Encyclopedia (ONE), which has been active since 2006, is a free, online resource that is available to anyone who is interested in learning more about the Silver State.

By Joanne Mallari

During National Poetry Month, I met Stephanie Gibson, who is a program manager at Nevada Humanities. When Stephanie invited me to curate a panel for the 2019 Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl, she asked me this question: How do you see poetry functioning out in the world?

By Angela M. Brommel

You can’t explain to friends from home how the desert makes it better, but you try:

Imagine a heat so dry that it presses down into the earth, releasing its scent so that it takes on the comforting smell of clay pots in your grandmother’s kitchen when you were a child,

By Kimberly Roberts

The invention of the automobile changed how Americans interacted with their landscape. Once confined to railroad tracks and wagon roads, the great American expanse was now open and available, and exploring by car signified a new freedom for those who could afford it.

By Bruce Isaacson

Even in the shadow of Casinosaurus

Life springs irrepressible from the sands

Artists, poets, lovers, children

Dream of the seventh gold city...

By Christina Barr

The seeds of Great Basin Young Chautauqua began in 1992 at the urging of a group of young people who saw their parents enjoying Nevada Humanities' newly formed Great Basin Chautauqua festival. Recognizing the program's value for young people, Nevada Humanities created the concept of Young Chautauqua and launched the Great Basin Young Chautauqua program in 1993.

By Kelli Luchs and Derek Weis

The recent designation of neon as Nevada’s official state element ensures that neon and Las Vegas will be forever linked. It was thus auspicious timing for the Neon Museum and the Las Vegas News Bureau to join forces to highlight some of the most iconic Las Vegas signs in their exhibit Then and Now: The Neon Boneyard,

By Deon Reynolds

A few years back, my wife Trish and I were commissioned to create several large-scale wheat paste murals for the Western Folklife Center’s National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada … we cooked up our own flour and water mixture to make the glue, which is applied to the wall, as well as over the art work itself. The images were printed on 24-inch-wide rolls of light-weight plotter paper.

By Christopher Daniels

Author Barry Lopez states “the only thing holding us together are stories and compassion.” I love stories of all genres and media. I live for terrible made-for-TV movies, binge on gripping Netflix dramas, have a stacks of books on my nightstands (that I vow I am going to read before purchasing more new books), gleefully research the mythologies of various world wisdom traditions, and watch, with wide-eyed wonder, the magic of live theatre.

By Frank X. Mullen

If you want to get to know someone well, walk a mile in their shoes, so the saying goes.

The scholars in the Nevada Humanities Great Basin Young Chautauqua program go further than a mere mile: for a time, they inhabit historical characters from the inside out. It’s scholarship as performance. They act— then react— to an audience.

By Kelbey Hilliard

I was never a kid who was afraid of the spotlight. My whole life, I’ve always been happy to take center stage and put on a show. I was shy meeting new people, and still can be, but always dreamed of performing one day in a huge, bright theatre.