'Dear Great Plains' opens Nov. 1 at Great Plains Art Museum

As part of the Center for Great Plains Studies’ new Student Storyteller in Residence initiative, Husker student Karla Hernandez Torrijos spent the past year asking people to write postcards to the Great Plains. With those postcards, she created a collaborative, community storytelling project that will be on view at the Great Plains Art Museum starting Nov. 1.

“The project hopes to tell a different story of the Great Plains: more complex, more diverse and more nuanced,” wrote Hernandez Torrijos, a sophomore English major. “A collective letter, the project raises questions of heritage, history and home.”

Dozens of postcards will be on view on the mezzanine level of the museum, and visitors can write their own to add to the project. Among the postcards are colorful drawings, poems, memories and recipes.

The opening reception for “Dear Great Plains” will take place during First Friday, 5 to 7 p.m. Nov. 1. Admission to the museum is always free.

Hernandez Torrijos is a poet and workshop facilitator who has read at such Nebraska venues as The Bay, El Museo Latino and the Wick Alumni Center. She has received the 2024 Gaffney Prize for Poetry, 2023 Irby F. Wood Prize for Poetry and 2021 Vreeland Award for Poetry and was the 2021–22 Creative in Community Resident for The LUX Center for the Arts. Hernandez Torrijos’ writing interrogates one’s understanding of home, displacement and the liminal space in between. Her chapbook “saturn devouring his daughter” is forthcoming from Game Over Books.

The Student Storyteller in Residence program is funded by the Michael Farrell Fund for Student Storytelling, administered through the University of Nebraska Foundation.