Steve Langan

Steve Langan was born in Milwaukee and raised in Omaha. He earned degrees from the University of Nebraska and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Langan is the author of Freezing (2001), Notes on Exile and Other Poems (2005), Meet Me at the Happy Bar (2009), and What It Looks Like, How It Flies (2013).

In Prairie Schooner, Nicky Beer wrote, “Though the landscapes of the poems are distinctly interior and psychological, one cannot help but read this interior as a uniquely American one. Much of the anomie and anxiety in Notes on Exile and Other Poems seems to be the product of a culture where rapture is trivialized by its proximity with the quotidian, and language is often a treacherous, euphemistic subterfuge. Langan is clearly developing his considerable gift to elegize the fragmented, desperate, and soulful American poetic voice on the cusp of the twenty-first century.”

Reviewing for MAKE Magazine, Weston Cutter noted, “What makes Langan’s Meet Me at the Happy Bar stand so far out from other collections is not just the whirligig zip and whiplash he causes by putting disparate lines next to and on top of each other, nor the ache for some substantial meaning to bedazzle all this flotsam onto, some foundation to leave the heaps upon. No, what makes this all such a big deal is the explicit emphasis on now, on time.”

Langan teaches at the University of Nebraska MFA in Writing program. He is founder and director of the Seven Doctors Project, based in Omaha, in which area writers guide healthcare workers in a writing workshop.