Riverfront Readings with Jason Ryberg, Amber Fraley, Jesse Kates

Friday, December 13th, 7:00 PM
The Writers Place
Nonprofit Village
31 W 31st Street, KCMO 64108

Please join us for our December 13th reading featuring Jason Ryberg, Amber Fraley, and Jesse Kates.

Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks, and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and countless love letters, never sent. He is an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is Fence Post Blues (River Dog Press, 2023). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are many strange and wonderful woodland critters.

Amber Fraley is a native Kansan, journalist, essayist, storyteller, and wife and mom to the two greatest people in the world. She’s the author of the darkly humorous essay collection Kansas GenExistential, the viral essay Gen X Will Not Go Quietly, the new adult novel The Bug Diary, as well as numerous human-interest articles in regional magazines like KANSAS! Growing up in Lawrence and Wichita, Amber spent her formative years with her face in a book or at the mall with her friends. She loves Kansas with all her heart, is frequently awkward in public, and desperately wishes to see a tornado and live to tell the tale.

Jesse Kates is the songwriter, singer, and guitarist behind pop band The Sexy Accident and a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s creative writing program. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri with his wife Stephanie and sons Tobias and Jonas. Jim Daniels, author of Rowing Inland wrote, “Extra Pith (Spartan Press) is Jesse Kates’ first book of poems, but he writes with the subtlety and assurance of a well-seasoned veteran in this powerful debut collection. Mixing sharp, crisp, imagery with the sonorous wit of his song lyrics, Kates brings the full package to the page. In the daily struggles to balance love, family, marriage, and love again, he is always alert to the subtle emotional shifts that can so easily topple us. When all else is dark, Kates is out there trying to make out the faint glimmers for himself, and for his readers.”

Suggested donations: $5 non-members, $4 members, $3 students

All suggested donations go to the artists.