Brown Bag Lunch Program

The Niobrara County Library will host a Brown Bag Lunch Program on Friday, September 9 at noon. Nancy Curtis, owner and operator of High Plains Press will present a program about writing and publishing. Various types of publishing will be discussed as well as a presentation of some of the works High Plains Press has published.

High Plains Press, located near Glendo, Wyoming, has published 40 books since its beginning in 1984. The company now publishes about four books a year and focuses on history of Wyoming and the West.

Publisher Nancy Curtis says that when she founded the company there were few other book publishing companies in Wyoming. “I knew people who were writing books of regional interest that were definitely good enough to be in print. But there was no one to publish them.” She tested the waters with a poetry chapbook and then attended the University of Denver Publishing Institute to firm up her knowledge. Then she returned to her Wyoming cattle ranch and started publishing.

High Plains Press has won three Wrangler awards for poetry, including one this year for Cloud Seeding by Stacy Coyle, and has published several Spur Award finalists, as well as Ben Franklin Award finalists.

Recent new books include “A Triceratops Hunt in Pioneer Wyoming” which is set around the Lusk area and the “Last Eleven Days of Earl Durand” about the 1939 crime spree of the young mountain man from Powell that the media called the Tarzan of the Tetons.

Curtis is the co-editor of three collections of writing by contemporary western women published by Houghton Mifflin, “Leaning into the Wind,” “Woven on the Wind,” and “Crazy Woman Creek.” She and her husband, Doug, operate a small ranch near Glendo. Her operation of the ranch is hands-on. A typical winter day consists of feeding cattle in the morning and editing books in the afternoon. “It’s a perfect combination, she says. “We try to raise a few good cattle and publish a few books.”

For more information about the Brown Bag Lunch program contact the library at 334-3490.