Jewel Rodgers is a poet, artist and placemaker from North Omaha. She's the founder of PlaceMade, a resident-led group creating community spaces on vacant lots in North Omaha. In July, PlaceMade opened the skate park Caden's Corner on Florence Boulevard.
Rodgers was a Buffett Scholar at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and went on to receive a Master’s in Real Estate Development from New York University. She was nominated for best performance poet at the 2022 Omaha Entertainment and Arts Award. Rodgers also coaches youth poetry at Culxr House with the Nebraska Writers Collective.
Her multi-sensory poetry collection “Wax Over Water” received a Populus Fund Grant in 2023 through the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York, and she’s a 2023 fellow at the Union For Contemporary Art in Omaha.