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Prairie Schooner 78.4 (2004) 46-92



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A Prairie Schooner Portfolio

Glenna Luschei

In Appreciation

Glenna Luschei, known to her business colleagues as Glenna Berry-Horton, has endowed in perpetuity the literary quarterly Prairie Schooner, one of the oldest magazines in continuous publication, and its editor, through the Luschei Endowment at the University of Nebraska Foundation.

Poet, publisher, editor, businesswoman, and philanthropist, Glenna Luschei announced her gift during the Prairie Schooner 75th Anniversary Celebration and Conference in early October, 2001. A thousand writers, readers, and supporters had gathered for three days in Lincoln to express our conviction that art both celebrates and mourns, sometimes at once.

We did not expect this marvelous gift just a few short days after 9/11. We only wanted to see Glenna again, come from her home in California. As a well-published writer and the editor and founder of the ground-breaking magazine Café Solo, the first woman member of the board of COSMEP, and a leader in the small press movement in the United States, Glenna Luschei has been a cherished colleague and contributor. Now she has ensured the life of Prairie Schooner.

To mark the Luschei endowment and our new $1,000 annual Luschei Prize, Steven Sher has gathered a group of remembrances to describe and praise Glenna Luschei in our pages. Thanks to him and to Glenna's friends who wrote so abundantly. This sample represents their response. [End Page 46]

Glenna Luschei

For the past twenty-seven years, Glenna Berry-Horton has been an avocado rancher in the Carpinteria Valley where for four years she served as State Land Use Officer for California Women in Agriculture. An active participant in Calavo, the avocado company that markets her fruit, and a member of the California Avocado Society, she has appeared before the Board of Supervisors of Santa Barbara County to speak on land use and growing issues in the Carpinteria Valley. She has served both as a regular and alternate member of the Family Services Bureau of the USDA. A bilingual speaker, she has interpreted for migrant farm workers at doctors' offices and, as a member of the San Luis Obispo County Commission on the Status of Women, for three years she has been an advocate for agricultural women workers.

Under the name Glenna Luschei, Berry-Horton has been publisher of the poetry magazines Café Solo and Solo for nearly forty years. As a writer and scholar she has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a D.H. Lawrence Fellowship in New Mexico, an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from St. Andrew's Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, North Carolina, and a Master of Life Award from her alma mater, the University of Nebraska. For four years she served as a national panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.

As a poet, Glenna Luschei is the author of many chapbooks, special editions, and trade books, most recently Shot With Eros published by John Daniel in 2002. She was named Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo City and County for the year 2000. As a teacher, she has been part of the faculty at UCLA's Arts Reach, for Chaplin College at the California Men's Colony, at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and Atascadero State Hospital.

Now completing her Ph.D. studies in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Glenna Luschei has received a fellowship for research on Medieval Studies and the Troubadours at the University of Portugal, Coimbra and she is translating Twelfth-Century Portuguese poetry by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz for a forthcoming artist book, The Prison of Love. [End Page 47]

Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser, now Poet Laureate...

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