poetry
Riverfront Readings featuring Robert L. Dean, Jr., Cathleen Bascom, and Tim Bascom
Friday, April 8th, 8:00 PM Central (US and Canada) Please join us for our April 8th Zoom reading featuring Robert L. Dean, Jr., Cathleen Bascom, and Tim Bascom. To attend, please register for the reading at https://squoom.com/z/rf220408, and you will be provided with the information needed to join the reading. Robert L. Dean, Jr., is the author of The Aerialist Will not be Performing: ekphrastic poems and flash fictions to the art of Steven Schroeder (Turning Plow Press, 2020), At the Lake with Heisenberg (Spartan Press, 2018), and a forthcoming chapbook, Pulp, with Finishing Line Press. A multiple Best of the Net nominee and a Pushcart nominee, his work has appeared in many publications. He has been a professional musician and has worked at The Dallas Morning News. He lives Augusta, Kansas. Cathleen Bascom was recently elected the first woman Bishop of Kansas in the Episcopal Church and Of Green Stuff Woven is her debut novel. Her life has been a braid of literary and academic pursuits, prairie restoration efforts, and spiritual leadership. She completed an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. She holds various other degrees in English Literature and Theology. Cathleen was named Urban Steward of the Year for the installation of an urban prairie greenspace in response to the devastating floods in Iowa in 2008. These experiences are imaginatively tapped in Of Green Stuff Woven. Tim Bascom is author of a novel, two collection of essays, and two prize-winning memoirs about years spent in East Africa as a youth: Chameleon Days (Houghton Mifflin) and Running to the Fire (U of Iowa Press). His fiction has appeared in Fiction Southeast, Profane, Mainstreet Rag, and Lalitamba, winning the 2021 fiction prize at Briar Cliff Review. His essays have won prizes at The Missouri Review and Florida Review, being selected for Best American Travel Writing and Best Creative Nonfiction, as well as the anthologies Law and Disorder and Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie.
Riverfront Readings featuring Annette Hope Billings, Colleen Maynard, and Celeste Oster
Zoom Kansas City, MO, United StatesPlease join us for our May 13th Zoom reading featuring Annette Hope Billings, Colleen Maynard, and Celeste Oster.
Riverfront Readings featuring Angela Carole Brown and Silvia Kofler
The Writers Place | The Nonprofit Village 31 W. 31st Street, Kansas City, MO, United StatesPlease join us for our June 10th reading featuring Angela Carol Brown and Silvia Kofler.
Riverfront Readings features Hadara Bar-Nadav and Jermaine Thompson
The Writers Place | The Nonprofit Village 31 W. 31st Street, Kansas City, MO, United StatesPlease join us for our September 9th reading featuring Hadara Bar-Nadav and Jermaine Thompson, with music by Too Late for Satellites. Proof of vaccination is required. Masks are encouraged.
Riverfront Readings featuring Cheryl Unruh, Jim Hoy, and William Sheldon
Riverfront Readings for Friday, February 10th
Riverfront Readings featuring Carl Bettis and James Benger
The Writers Place | The Nonprofit Village 31 W. 31st Street, Kansas City, MO, United StatesPlease join us for our March 10th reading featuring Carl Bettis and James Benger.
Riverfront Readings featuring Patricia Cleary Miller and Trish Reeves
The Writers Place | The Nonprofit Village 31 W. 31st Street, Kansas City, MO, United StatesPlease join us for our April 14th reading featuring Patricia Cleary Miller and Trish Reeves. If you're not able to attend in person, this event will be live-streamed on Zoom. Please register for the Zoom session at https://squoom.com/z/rf230414, and you will be provided with the information needed to join the reading. A founding board member and past president of The Writers Place, Patricia Cleary Miller finds discipline, energy, and inspiration from her fellow poets in The Diversifiers. Her poems have appeared in New Letters, Connecticut Review, Cottonwood, I -70 Review, English Stand, Big Muddy, and Helicon Nine. Her collections include Crimson Lights, the poems she wrote as poet laureate of the Harvard Alumni Association; and from BkMk Press, Starting a Swan Dive and Can You Smell the Rain? (which includes her poem ”Mother Won’t Wear Polypropylene,” which won a Pushcart Prize). As a professor of English at Rockhurst University she founded The Rockhurst Review, chaired the Department of English and the Humanities Division, and raised funds for endowed scholarships in the Humanities. Trish Reeves will be reading from her new book, The Receipt (Cynren Press, April 2023). Reeves has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, Keck, and the Kansas Arts Commission. Her first book, Returning the Question, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize. Her poems have been anthologized and published in numerous journals, including Ploughshares, New Letters, Women’s Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, and Leon Literary Review. In 2022, she received the Liberty Bell Award from the Johnson County Kansas Bar Association for her years leading Changing Lives Through Literature for Johnson County Corrections. Suggested donations: $5.00 non-members $4.00 Writers Place members $3.00 students All suggested donations go to the artists. Join us at The Writers Place Nonprofit Village 31 W 31st Street, KCMO or by Zoom at https://squoom.com/z/rf230414
Riverfront Readings with Mary Silwance and Bob Sykora
The Writers Place | The Nonprofit Village 31 W. 31st Street, Kansas City, MO, United StatesPlease join us for our June 9th reading featuring Mary Silwance and Bob Sykora.
Riverfront Readings features Lindsey Martin-Bowen, Kalpna Singh-Chitnis, Carlos Ramos
Zoom Kansas City, MO, United StatesPlease join us for our September 10th Zoom reading featuring Lindsey Martin-Bowen, Kalpna Singh-Chitnis, and Carlos Ramos.
To attend, please register for the reading at https://squoom.com/z/rf230910, and you will be provided with the information needed to join the reading.
Riverfront Special: Feeling the Gap
The Writers Place | The Nonprofit Village 31 W. 31st Street, Kansas City, MO, United StatesFeeling 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.