Paul Dickey, born in Hardtner, KS, in 1948, grew up in Wichita and began publishing poetry in the 1970s while a student at Wichita State University. At this time, he published in Kansas Quarterly (Kansas State University), Karamu (Eastern Illinois University), Quartet (Texas A&M University), and Nimrod (University of Tulsa). Dickey  studied the writing of poetry and fiction as a graduate student at WSU, primarily with Bienvenido Santos in the formulative and early years of the WSU MFA program.

In 1980, Dickey took a hiatus from writing while concentrating on family and a career as a data processing professional. In 1985, he moved his family to Omaha.  Dickey started to publish again in 2003. Since then, he has published poetry, creative non-fiction and fiction in about 100 literary journals, including many nationally prominent ones, such as Pleiades, The Bellevue Literary Review, Sentence, Prairie Schooner, Potomac Review, Memoir (and), Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Midwest Quarterly, Rattle, The Laurel Review, and many others, both print and online.

Dickey’s first poetry chapbook, What Wisconsin Took, was published by the Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin Libraries - Madison in May, 2006.  Dickey’s poetry has been anthologized in An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions, 2009) and Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of Poetry ( Backwaters Press, 2007).

His first full-length book of poems, They Say This is How Death Came Into the World, was published by Mayapple Press in January, 2011.  A second book, Wires Over the Homeplace, was published by Pinyon Publishing in October, 2013. 

Dickey has a Bachelors degree from Wichita State University and a Master of Arts degree from Indiana University, Bloomington, in the History and Philosophy of Science. He is married and has three adult children, three grandsons, and one granddaughter. Retired from his data processing career, he now teaches philosophy in Omaha, Nebraska, at Metropolitan Community College. Since 2008, Dickey has broadened his writing efforts to include playwriting and has written several one-act and two full-length plays.  He travels to give readings and a prose poetry workshop throughout the Midwest

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Books:

• Wires Over the Homeplace (Pinyon Publishing, 2013)
• They Say This is How Death Came Into The World (Mayapple Press, 2011)
• What Wisconsin Took (Parallel Press, 2006)
• Liberal Limericks of 2012 (Missouri River Review Press, 2012)

Plays:

• The Good News According to St. Dude
• Don and Dawn Have Secrets & the Raccoon River

Shorter Plays

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Libericks

A new candidate’s come out, you all.
I will call him "the Mister Gin Doll."
It remains to be seen
anyone on the scene
will let dudes from the swamp touch the ball.  
7/5/15

Tonight on an Iowa bluff
Bernie said, “Enough is enough!
#1 in education,
not incarceration!
The nation at last up to snuff!”
7/3/15

Some days, it’s hard facing the odds,
what with all the bigoted gods,
who are watching me
and say I’m too poor to be free,
but really they're Republican frauds.
7/1/15

The Donald may not be invited
to the chauvinism he incited.
With all things he has waxed
and the famous he’s axed,
it turns out that he’s quite short-sighted.
6/30/15

It has been a big week for the Court,
and the bigots have come up short.
What are they gonna do
with their hate still to spew
but can’t make an appealable tort?
6/26/2015

Poem Not Published in the Ark River Review, Vol. 2, #4

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Paul's website

Visiting Writers

Poets & Writers

Kansas Poets

Rattle Interview

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