Riverfront Special: Feeling the Gap

Feeling the Gap

Through poetry, fiction, and music, artists Gena Bardwell, Angela Hagenbach, and Phyllis Becker feel their ancestral history and fill in the gaps between yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Gena Bardwell is a Kansas City native, New York actor, writer, professor, and chair of the Department of Speech and Communication at Touro University, NY. Her latest play, Just Before Sunrise, was written and produced for NYC New Perspectives Theater 2022 Short Lab Series. She wrote Irene Stories, a collection of early 20th century remembrances from her centenarian Aunt. She has written and performed numerous monologues for theater companies in New York and historical dramatizations for the Juneteenth Jubilee Heritage Festivals in Weston, MO.

Angela Hagenbach is the founder of the Black Ancestors Awareness Campaign, a Trustee of the Weston Historical Museum, and a fifth-generation descendant of Weston, Missouri’s historically Black forebears. She authors Resilience in the Face of Adversity, a column in the quarterly Museum Musings newsletter for the Weston Historical Museum. Jazz recording artist and two-term Cultural Jazz Ambassador for the USA, Hagenbach is a historical fiction novelist and student of ancestral research.

Phyllis Becker is the coordinator of the Riverfront Reading series in KC. She has a book, How I Came to Love Jazz and Other Poems (2008, Helicon Nine Editions). Her poems have also been set to jazz on the compact disc Poetry of Love produced by jazz vocalist, Angela Hagenbach. Her latest book, Proof of Existence, is forthcoming from Scapegoat Press. Phyllis is also a senior fellow with the Full Frame Initiative and a consultant in juvenile justice reform.

Also featuring special guest artist classical vocalist Cassie Leon.