The Department of English, the Creative Writing Program, Prairie Schooner and the University of Nebraska Press will host the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize Symposium, Feb. 15 and 16 at UNL.

Recent Prairie Schooner book prize winners Paul Guest, Anne Finger, Mari L’Esperance and Kara Candito will read from their winning collections and participate in panel discussions on writing and the writing life. All events are free and open to the public, in the Dudley Bailey Library on the second floor of Andrews Hall.

The first panel, 3 p.m. Feb. 15, is “Sources and Resources: Inspiration, Research, and Developing Projects,” with Guest and L’Esperance. The first reading is at 7:30 that evening when Finger and Candito read from their work.

A panel noon, Feb. 16 is “Revision and Advice: Who Do You Trust and How Do You Know When It’s Over” with Finger and Candito. At 3 p.m. Feb. 16, Guest and L’Esperance will read from their work.

Guest won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize from UNL’s Center for Great Plains Studies. His first collection, “The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World,” won the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. He lives in Chattanooga, Tenn. “Notes for my Body Double,” was published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press. He is a visiting professor of English at the University of West Georgia.

L’Esperance, 2007 winner of the Prairie Schooner prize for “The Darkened Temple,” is a graduate of New York University’s creative writing program, where she was a New York Times Co. Foundation Creative Writing Fellow. In 2002, L’Esperance received a Pushcart Prize nomination for her poem “Pantoum of the Blind Cambodian Women,” published in The Worcester Review. L’Esperance has been awarded residency grants from Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and Hedgebrook. She has taught creative writing at University of New York, Merritt College in Oakland, Calif., and the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

Candito won the 2008 Prairie Schooner prize in poetry fo her manuscript, “Taste of Cherry.” Her poems and critical prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2007, Poet Lore, the Florida Review and the Pedestal Review. She is a doctoral candidate in English at Florida State University, where she specializes in poetry and literary theory.

Finger won the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in short fiction for her manuscript, “Call Me Ahab.” She has taught creative writing at Wayne State University and the University of Texas, and as a writer-in-residence at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Independent Living Resource Center. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Djerassi, Centrum and Hedgebrook.

Prairie Schooner (http://prairieschooner.unl.edu) is a national literary quarterly published with the support of the UNL English Department and the University of Nebraska Press.