Paul Dickey, born in Hardtner, KS, in 1948 and grew up in Wichita, 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 W.S.U, primarily with Bienvenido Santos in the formulative and early years of the W.S.U. MFA program.

 

In 1980, Dickey left the W.S.U. MFA program and 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 his prose poetry workshop throughout the Midwest