A Far Allegiance

As an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska in the early and mid-1960s, Roy Scheele studied with Karl Shapiro and attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, where he met Robert Frost, John Ciardi, and John Frederick Nims. Scheele holds a B.A. in classical Greek and an M.A. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has taught classics at Nebraska and Creighton University and English at the University of Tennessee at Martin, a gymnasium in Germany, and Doane College in Crete, Nebraska, where he is currently associate professor of English and Poet-in-Residence. Scheele's poems, critical essays, and interviews and profiles have been widely published in such distinguished journals as Poetry, Poets & Writers, Prairie Schooner, The New England Review, The Southern Review, and numerous university and little magazines. His poems have been frequently anthologized, most notably in Strong Measures (Harper & Row, 1986), and his interviews with Hayden Carruth, Miroslav Holub, and W. D. Snodgrass have been reprinted in The Verse Book of Interviews and elsewhere. Scheele's first book-length collection of poems, Pointing Out the Sky (Sandhills Press, 1985), was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, and he has won several first-place awards in the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets international poetry competitions. In 1993 he received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council.