Riverfront Readings & The Writers Place
present
A Tribute to Phil Miller
& the Annual Scholarship Reading
Sunday, October 4th
3:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)
Register for the Zoom reading at https://squoom.com/z/rfz211024
Phil Miller was a friend to many poets and a fine poet himself. A major supporter of the greater Kansas City writing community, he started the Riverfront Reading series, was a co-founder of The Writers Place, and served as a co-editor of Poutpourri literary magazine. Over the years, he gave area and regional writers a venue for their work. In 2002 he and his wife, Nancy Eldredge, moved to Mount Union, Pennsylvania, where he continued to write, promote others’ work, and publish The Same magazine. Phil was also a fine teacher and a kind, intelligent, highly articulate, and supportive person. He passed away on Valentine’s Day of 2011. In honor of the tenth anniversary of his death, the annual Phil Miller Scholarship reading will also be a tribute to Phil.
To read one poem by Phil or about him please RSVP by October 20th at philmillertribute@riverfrontreadings.com. Slots are limited, so it will be a first-come basis.
Send a favorite memory or thought about Phil in a sentence or two to carl.bettis@gmail.com.
How to Donate
The scholarship is for students at KCKCC, where Phil taught for many years.
- For online donations: Visit https://www.kckcc.edu/foundation/giving/online-giving.html, select one-time or recurring, select or fill in the amount. For Designation: Write in "Philip Miller Scholarship." Click "Give securely" and complete your payment.
- Mail a donation to KCKCC, 7250 State Avenue, Kansas City, KS 66112, Attn: Mary Spangler. Make checks payable to KCKCC Foundation, "Philip Miller Scholarship" in the comment section.
- Bid on Phil Miller Tribute Baskets filled with Phil's books and original artwork. Baskets will be posted on the Writers Place website at https://thewritersplace.wildapricot.org by 10/12. Bidding opens 10/22, closes at noon 10/24. Send bids to baskets@riverfrontreadings.com.
Silvia Kofler is a widely published poet, translator, and educator who has read her work in many places like the Yale Club and Poets House in New York City, and at Schokoladen in Berlin, Germany. Her book Gambol the World: Eine Weltanschauung, by Spartan Press has been translated into Portuguese by Carlos Ramos and will be published by Ghost Editions in Portugal.
Mary Bunten has been published in 
Michelle Pond is a poet and photographer who likes sports, jazz and art inspired by other art. She also is a veteran who served in the U.S. Marine Corps. She published a chapbook of grief poems, I Keep You with Me. Her work also has appeared in publications such as Thorny Locust, The Enigmatist and Kansas Time + Place--An Anthology of Heartland Poetry. She combines original photographs and poems into visual art pieces that are exhibited in the Kansas City, Missouri, metropolitan area.
Divya Ramesh has moved across many states and has lived in many cities. She is grateful for a fluidity of geography that has allowed her to intimately see and understand this country. She moved to Kansas in 2017 quite by accident for a job in early childhood education research and sprouted trenchant roots in prairie sod faster than she could've imagined, so although Arizona is home now, Kansas also holds a place in a motley heart. Divya has held many different jobs--most of them involving working with children or writing in some capacity. One of her hopes as a writer is to encourage children and youth to use poetry as a way to capture and engage forgotten histories. Divya has coordinated poetry and writing workshops for children and child advocacy professionals in almost all the cities in which she has lived. Her poems have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, The Latin American Literary Review, American Chordata, and a few other publications. Some of her favorite poets include her undergraduate mentor and professor, Gregory Djanikian, Kasey Jueds, Ada Limón, Beth Ann Fennelly, and J.H. Yun. Divya moonlights as an aspiring picture book writer and graduate student. Anyone who knows Divya well reminds her to go to sleep.
Chloe Wagner, whose name means young grass, a profusion of blooms, and the Greek goddess of unripe corn, has had her poems featured in the art show "Nature and the Poet," a collection of poems by local artists profoundly moved by nature, cosponsored by the Liberty Arts Commission and Carol Kariotis. Although she has submitted her work far too infrequently and often after being asked, she has been published in Friends Journal, The Montucky Review, and Thorny Locust, and can be heard on the CDs Jump Start Art's Poetry Sampler #1 and Johnson County Library's PoetryBlitz! She has been a featured reader at Morning Day Cafe in Liberty, Mo. and at the Neon Gallery and the 51st Street Coffeehouse in Kansas City, MO. She has read several times in the poetry slam hosted by Marc Smith at the Green Mill in Chicago, where Marc invented poetry slams in 1987, and has been a featured reader at Morning Day Cafe in Liberty, MO and at the Neon Gallery and the 51st Street Coffeehouse in Kansas City. She is working on putting together a collection of her poems called Eating Light.
Linda Rodriguez's 12th book, The Fish That Got Away: The Sixth Guppy Anthology, is about to be published. Her 11th book was Fishy Business: The Fifth Guppy Anthology (edited). Dark Sister: Poems was her 10th book and a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, an anthology she co-edited, were published in 2017. Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery in the award-winning series featuring Cherokee detective, Skeet Bannion, and Revising the Character-Driven Novel will be published in 2021. Her short story, "The Good Neighbor," published in Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film.
Mary Troy is the author of five books of fiction—three collections of short stories and two novels: Swimming on Hwy N, Beauties, Cookie Lily, The Alibi Café and other stories, and Joe Baker Is Dead. Her stories and essays have been published widely. She has won the USA Book Award for literary fiction, the Devil's Kitchen Reading Award, and a Nelson Algren Award. Her sixth book of new and selected stories will be published in 2021. Mary directed the UMSL MFA program and served as editor of Natural Bridge, a journal of contemporary literature, for ten years. She has won the University of Missouri system leadership award and the Missouri Governor's award for excellence in teaching.