Photo Credit: Helen Stringfellow
Kelly Madigan Erlandson is the award- winning author of Getting Sober: A Practical Guide to Making it Through the First 30 Days (McGraw-Hill, 2007). She is also an accomplished poet and essayist whose work has been published in literary magazines and anthologies such as Best New Poets 2007, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, Calyx, Natural Bridge and elsewhere. (For a comprehensive list of her publications, Click Here.)
Her poetry has been featured by Garrison Keillor on his national radio broadcast, The Writer's Almanac. Her manuscript Born in the House of Love won the Main-Traveled Roads Chapbook Award, and she has received the Distinguished Artist Award in Literature from the Nebraska Arts Council. Kelly is a 2008 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing. She has been awarded residencies at Jentel and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
Kelly has been a licensed drug and alcohol counselor in Nebraska since 1983, and has worked since 1985 at BryanLGH Independence Center, a comprehensive, hospital-based treatment center in Lincoln, Nebraska. She has also served as a Site Visitor for the United States Drug-Free Schools Program.
She is a sought-after presenter for conferences and training events for counselors or other health professionals, church groups, schools, writing workshops, lecture series and readings. Find information here about her creativity workshops: writingworkshops.blogspot.com
Kelly's Parents, Tom and Marion
Kelly is married to Eric Erlandson, and together they have two daughters, Tara
and Maggie, and one son-in-law, Benjamin. Kelly's mother is an artist, and her
Photo Credit: Algis J. Laukaitis
father, now deceased, was a navigator in the Air Force. She has one sister, one
brother, and a large supply of cousins, aunts and uncles.
In recent years, Kelly has been exploring Nebraska rivers by canoe and kayak, including the Middle Loup, Dismal, Platte, Missouri, Elkhorn, Little Blue, Cedar, Calamus, Niobrara, and Big Blue rivers.