© prairiesongs.com HEIDI HERMANSON has been published in Midwest Quarterly, Hiram Poetry Review, PlainSpoke, Filling the Empty Room, Mental Horizons, Midwest Compilation, the Omaha World Hearld (”Nebraska On A Dollar a Day”) and elsewhere. She has been in many public art projects such as "8 counts/24" (writers had 24 hours to write on a theme pulled randomly from a hat) "OmaHome" (writers wrote inspired by a piece of artwork; the writing was then interpreted by a local actor), and the benchMarks project, which featured brief inspirational quotes on bus benches throughout the city. She organized the first Poets' Chautauqua at the State Fair and there released her first chapbook, Midwest Hotel. Her second chapbook, Missouri Joyride, is forthcoming.  Heidi has organized and directed three ekphrastic shows which she describes as a marriage between visual art and poetry. She runs a monthly open mike, "Naked Words." In 2010 she won the Omaha Public Library's annual poetry contest and performed her winning work accompanied by Silver Roots, a New York-based violin and flute duo. She has read at the John H Milton Conference in Vermillion, SD, at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City, at Tunes in the Town Square (which features poetry at the band's break) in Ralston, Nebraska, on the Kerry Pedestrian Bridge over the Missouri, and at the Roebuck Pub in England. In her spare time she hopes to open a library of maps to towns that do not exist and learn the dialects of the seven-year cicada. In 2008 Heidi received her MFA from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Photo by Heidi Hermanson