Volume 50 (2025)

Dear Reader,

It’s an honor to introduce the 50th edition of Ellipsis. Each year, this journal showcases the creative and intellectual work of students, faculty, staff, and alumni from across the university, and it’s been a pleasure to help shepherd this issue—my first as managing editor—into print.

This year has been a particularly turbulent one at UNO and beyond. With public support for the arts and education under fire and political divisions dominating the national stage, the work of building grassroots creative community feels less like an extracurricular and more like a necessity.

Inside this issue, you’ll encounter voices both seasoned and new, polished and raw, in forms that span the lyrical, visual, and academic. From the vengeful catharsis of "Juan Darién" to the seductive kitsch of The Phantom of the Opera, from a grandfather raising his finger to a father straightening his hat, from grieving at Margaritaville to yearning at the House of Dance and Feathers, this volume takes us to places both familiar and uncanny. It encourages us to ask big questions, dissolve our boundaries, and honor our dead.

Though the image of the “lone genius in the attic” still looms large in our cultural imagination, working in publishing reveals the opposite: making art is collective work. This issue is the result of months of dialogue, revision, and care by writers, artists, and our graduate student readers/editors. I'm deeply grateful to the contributors who entrusted us with their work and the editors who approached it with such curiosity and care in order to make these pieces the best they can be.

Special thanks to Abram Himelstein, Jeanne Pavy, and Alex Dimeff—and to everyone else who helped bring this milestone issue to life.

Warmly,

Laura DeFazio