The Plains Writer Series opens again, this time with fiction as its front.  

The first event features Lydia Kang, author of ‘K-Jane,’ a Kirkus Best Book of 2025. Kang will read from her book, ‘K-Jane,’ on April 30 at 2 p.m. in the 2nd floor lounge of Humanities. A Q&A session will take place after the reading. The fiction slam will take place after the Plains Writer Series at The Max Bar & Grill, at 7 p.m. This is an opportunity for the community to debut their own flash fiction in a competition style. Both events are free for anyone, but a $5 joining fee is required for the slam if you wish to participate. 
Chad Christensen, a professor at Wayne State College, hosts both events, as this will be his fourth year involved in both the Plains Writers Series and poetry and fiction slams. “With the Plains Writers series, our focus each semester is on poetry for our Plains Writers Series, and the other one prose and sometimes fiction,” Christensen said. 

Both events are held in order to bring a bit more awareness to local writers of poetry, prose and fiction. The slam afterward aims to bring the community together to listen to one another’s writings. 

“Plains Writer Series kind of operates pretty similar to each other,” Holly Tomcak, a graduate assistant for the WSC Press, said. “It’s an event we do four times a year: two poetry, two fiction. We invite an author or two, but this semester we’ve stuck pretty much to one.”  

Kang is an award-winning author, known for her projects of, “K-Jane,” “Opium and Absinthe: A novel” and even various “Star Wars” books.  

“K-Jane” is a young-adult novel featuring a third generation Korean American named Jane Choi, who resides in Nebraska. Throughout the story, Choi feels slight guilt at not embracing her Korean culture, so she aims to learn more about her heritage and teach her younger siblings about it too.  

The fiction slam does tend to have a smaller audience according to Tomcak, but it does usually still attract a crowd. 

According to Tomcak, the fiction slam requires the reader to have two flash fiction stories, which consist of 400-1000 words with a narrative. After reading the first round, the judges will eliminate around half of the competition, and then the people who made it will read their second story. The judges then will make a final decision. 

“The theme for our fiction slam is diplomatic crabs, so prepare for diplomacy and crustaceans,” Tomcak said.