Jan Walkenhorst

Walkenhorst has also been instrumental in motivating support for the Libraries during the university’s giving day, Glow Big Red. She provides a challenge grant that is unlocked once the Libraries reaches its goal of raising a specific amount of donations. Her gift is added to the total raised. It is all meant to motivate alumni, students, and faculty to give to the Libraries. 

“If we expect to have a future, we need to preserve our past,” Walkenhorst said. “The past is embodied by the library.” 

Books, literature, and reading are passions that Walkenhorst says make connections and start conversations between people.

“You must hold books, and my philosophy is that you cannot read enough,” Walkenhorst said.

Walkenhorst was born in Madison, Nebraska, and grew up in North Platte, where the love of books was planted because of a wonderful Carnegie public library. Eventually she worked for the public library on its Archives of Western Literature collection during the summers.

While attending the university in the early 1970s to get her teaching degree, Walkenhorst often occupied an orange chair in Love Library, where she sat for many hours reading and waiting for her roommates, and she remembers it fondly. Dr. Robert Knoll in the Department of English was a big influence on her. Walkenhorst took Knoll’s class on Shakespeare, where she explored her favorite plays, including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V. She calls Shakespeare her “main man” and hopes to attend a Shakespeare play in London at the Globe Theatre one day. 

After graduating from Nebraska in 1974, Walkenhorst went on to teach English literature and theory of knowledge in Papillion, Nebraska. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was a special focus during her years of teaching, and its adaptation as a play would jumpstart a reconnection with former students to see the play’s performance in Omaha in 2023. 

In 1980, Walkenhorst moved to Dallas and taught British literature and Shakespeare for twenty years. She used funds from the English department to purchase plays and resource books for the school library. She also had her own overflowing collection of materials in her classroom. 

“The joke around the school was that my classroom was the second-floor library,” laughed Walkenhorst. 

When Walkenhorst retired, she returned to Nebraska and settled in Lincoln to work part-time for Lincoln Public Schools, where she just happened to have a daughter of Steve Pederson, former UNL athletic director, in her class. Pederson would recruit Walkenhorst to tutor student athletes in the subject areas of the humanities and social sciences for 20 years.