Who

The New Xanadu is an independent collaboration of students and teachers, artists and writers, teammates and friends. We met at the oldest liberal arts college in Nebraska, a place founded as “a literary institution of a high order” in 1872. Today the New Xanadu blends the finest traditions of our literary heritage with emerging interests and timely innovations that engage creators and creativity across campus and beyond.

Our mission is to explore the edges of this question: why do stories matter? We celebrate the power of stories and the craft of storytelling, in all its forms, striving to animate the literary arts, not as a dusty relic of a bygone era but as necessary equipment for life and work today.

Help us

The New Xanadu is a multimedia platform for innovative ideas, including yours. We are looking for curious and creative individuals like you who believe in the power of narrative to change the world, one individual life, one story of self at a time.

We want to empower new creators and explore the edges of our own narrative knowledge as a path to mindfulness and wellness. Knowing how to tell stories, and thus how to receive and interpret the stories others tell, is the basis for empathy, trust, and self-awareness.

“The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.”

— William Faulkner, from his speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950

Have an idea?

Stories can change the world.

Help us tell that story.