A Writer's Guide to Lincoln, Nebraska: Libraries, Bookstores, Writing Groups, and Presses

Bennett Martin is the main library of Lincoln City Libraries, and it is open daily. Card holders can reserve study rooms here, and groups can book the auditorium or the conference room. The Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors is upstairs. So is the Polley Music Library.

Gere Branch has study rooms and two meeting rooms, all reserved with a library card and PIN.

Walt Branch has study rooms and two meeting rooms, and it is home to a Collaborative Learning Lab. Reserve a room with your card and PIN.

Anyone can use Love Library's materials in the building. A community user card adds borrowing and interlibrary loan, and you need one to log in to the public computers. The library's community services page also points to consultations with subject specialists.

Writers working on the Great Plains will find the region's history and culture here, alongside manuscripts and rare books. The reading rooms open by appointment only; book through a My A&SC account. Exhibits are on the lower level of Love Library South.

Francie & Finch has been Lincoln's locally owned bookshop since 2017, in the historic Telephone Exchange Building. It keeps Nebraska authors on the shelves and runs a rotating art gallery. Author events and book launches come often, along with poetry readings.

A Novel Idea sells used, rare, out-of-print, and new books, signed and leather-bound editions among them. Look for it off P Street, across 14th from the University Square Garage. The store keeps resident cats and runs a youth writing contest.

Sower Books opened in 2024 as an inclusive bookstore for all ages. Its name comes from the Sower atop the State Capitol and from Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. Foster cats share the shop, which is closed Thursdays.

Elleinad sells children's books for readers from birth to 18, next to The Mill in historic College View. Picture-book and YA writers can see what the shelves carry now. It is closed Mondays.

The Mill's Haymarket café shares the Stacy Building at 8th and P with the company's roastery and bakery. It is open daily into the evening, and a Lincoln coffee guide lists it among good places to work or study.

The Mill at Telegraph opened in 2017 in a former telephone company building across from Lincoln High. Parking is free, and the café is open daily until late evening. Summer brings free concerts on the patio.

The Coffee House bills itself as Lincoln's first coffee shop and has been open since 1987. It has a quiet area and serves scratch-made food. Come early: it is open daily from morning to mid-afternoon.

The Charging Station is a two-story café in Havelock that serves breakfast and lunch all day. Its conference room can be booked for meetings.

Crescent Moon has served food, beer, wine, and cocktails in the Haymarket since 2001. On Wednesdays its Writers' Night is an open mic for poetry and prose. Songwriters get the mic on Thursdays.

The Hub Café is a farmer-owned restaurant, founded in 2016, that cooks with ingredients from small farms in and around Lincoln. It holds an open mic on the first and third Thursdays of the month, and a 10/11 NOW profile says spoken-word poets take the mic along with musicians and comedians. Local art hangs on the walls. It is closed Mondays.

Larksong is a literary nonprofit run by a group of writers and teachers. It keeps class fees low and teaches in person and online. Writers can use its co-working space or join a writers' group, and the Nebraska Writers Collective holds its monthly Lincoln Poetry Slam here. Book launches and retreats round out the calendar.

The Heritage Room collects books, manuscripts, letters, and photographs by and about Nebraska authors, and its staff answer questions about them. It runs the John H. Ames Reading Series, in which Nebraska authors read their work on video. With UNL's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities it keeps NebraskaAuthors.org, a database of more than 4,000 Nebraska writers, and authors with strong Nebraska ties can add their own entries.

Prairie Schooner is the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's quarterly literary journal. It publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews by writers at every stage of a career. The journal also runs a summer creative nonfiction contest and posts author interviews online.

The Center for the Book is Nebraska's affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book. It gives the Nebraska Book Awards and runs One Book One Nebraska, the statewide read. Its online guide lists writers' workshops and organizations across the state.

Nebraska's free book festival is held each year in Lincoln. Readers meet Nebraska authors at panels and signings, and booksellers and publishers fill a vendor market. The Center for the Book and the University of Nebraska Press are among its hosts.

The center publishes Great Plains Quarterly and Great Plains Research, along with the Atlas of the Great Plains and the Great Plains Encyclopedia. It names Great Plains Fellows and runs the Olson Great Plains series. The Great Plains Art Museum is part of the center.

UNL's digital humanities center works out of Love Library. Its projects include the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive and Petitioning for Freedom. The center runs a Digital Humanities Summer Fellows Program and hosts the Nebraska Forum on Digital Humanities.

Zea Books is the e-book imprint of UNL Libraries. Its scholarly and literary titles appear as PDFs on DigitalCommons@UNL, many with paperback editions through Lulu. Subjects run from Nebraska history and natural history to Japanese literature.

Humanities Nebraska gives grants, mini grants included, for public humanities projects. Its Speakers Bureau sends scholars to community programs around the state, and it also runs the Nebraska State Poet program.

The University of Nebraska Press was founded in 1941 and describes itself as the largest university press between Chicago and California. It is known for Native and Indigenous studies, anthropology, history, and sports. Books appear under the Nebraska, Bison Books, The Backwaters Press, and Potomac Books imprints, and the press has a journals division as well. Preparing a manuscript for the University of Nebraska Press

The Nebraska Arts Council gives merit-based fellowships to artists 19 and older who have lived in the state at least two years, chosen by a professional panel. The program rotates among three fields, and literature (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry) is one of them.

The Center for the Book gives these awards each year to books with a Nebraska tie: a Nebraska author, illustrator, or publisher, or a story set in or about the state. Categories range from fiction and poetry to history and Nebraska as Place.

Prairie Schooner's book prize has two categories, fiction and poetry. Winners have been named every year since 2003.

Each year the Center for Great Plains Studies honors the best nonfiction book on the Great Plains from the previous year, in any discipline. Authors or publishers nominate first-edition, full-length books in English.

The Center for the Book presents this award to one person for leadership and service in promoting Nebraska literature.

Editors For Students keeps a guide to grants and writing resources for students at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

The university print shop binds theses and dissertations in hardcover or spiral, on 25% cotton watermarked paper, and adds gold-foil stamping on request. It also prints banners and posters. The shop is open weekdays and set up for students, so others should call ahead.

The Book Arts studio has lead foundry type and two Vandercook proof presses. After-hours entry runs on university ID cards, so writers from outside UNL should ask the School of Art, Art History & Design about access.