DARREN CANADY, HYEJUNG KOOK & DEREK GRAF

Saturday, September 14th, 7pm, KCAI Crossroads Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice (1819 Grand Blvd. KCMO)

Darren CANADY hails from Topeka, KS. His work has been produced at the Alliance Theatre, American Conservatory Theatre, Aurora Theater, Congo Square Theater, Horizon Theatre, London’s the Old Vic Theatre, M Ensemble, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, American Blues Theater, and others. His awards include the Alliance Theater's Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Award, Chicago’s Black Excellence Award, the Black Theatre Alliance Award, and the American Theatre Critics Association’s Osborn Award. His work has been developed at numerous festivals including the O'Neill Theater Center’s National Playwright's Conference. His play You’re Invited appeared in The Best American Short Plays 2010-2011. His work has been seen or developed at the Quo Vadimus Arts’ ID America Festival, the Fremont Centre Theatre, Premiere Stages, the BE Company, Penumbra Theatre, and American Blues Theater. Darren is an alum of Carnegie Mellon University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Juilliard School. He is a current member of the Core Writers Program at the Playwrights’s Center and Midwest Dramatists Center. He is an artistic associate with American Blues Theater and Congo Square Theatre. He currently teaches playwriting at the University of Kansas.

Hyejung KOOK’s poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit, Half Mystic Radio, The Massachusetts Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Hyphen Magazine, and Pleiades. Other works include an essay in The Critical Flame and a chamber opera libretto. Hyejung was born in Seoul, Korea and now lives in Kansas with her husband and their two young children. She is a Fulbright grantee and a Kundiman fellow.

Derek GRAF's poems have appeared in Salt Hill, The Boiler, Portland Review, Booth, and elsewhere. He is currently a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Kansas, and he completed his MFA at Oklahoma State University. Starting this summer, he joined the Charlotte Street Foundation as one of their 2019-2020 Studio Residents.

KEVIN KILROY, MERCEDES LUCERO & BEN NICKOL

Saturday, September 14th, 7pm, KCAI Crossroads Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice (1819 Grand Blvd. KCMO)

Kevin KILROY is a writer and educator who works to blend genres and reimagine learning. His novella The Escapees (Spuyten Duyvil) was described as "a philosophical mystery set in a city where keys are plenty but locks are few." His book of poetic fictions, Dead Ends or Laughing Gas (Spuyten Duyvil), is "two-parts pulp, one-part Genet, with a twist of Beckettian humor.” He sells progressive science curriculum for Activate Learning, and he teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute. Currently, he is a Writer-in-Residence at the Charlotte Street Foundation.

Mercedes LUCERO is an Afro-Latinx writer and the author of Stereometry (Another New Calligraphy 2018). She is the winner of the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award for Poetry and you can see more of her work at www.mercedeslucero.com.

Ben NICKOL was raised in Idaho and attended the University of Arkansas and the University of Notre Dame, where he played basketball for the Fighting Irish. His prose has been recognized by the Arkansas Arts Council, Best American Sports Writing, and the University of Arkansas, among other organizations, and he's the author of the books Sun River (2019), Adherence (2016) and Where the Wind Can Find It (2015). His stories and essays have appeared widely, in Alaska Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Fourth Genre, Crab Orchard Review, Fugue, Tin House Online, The Los Angeles Review and elsewhere. In 2018, he joined the Creative Writing faculty at Wichita State University.

JAMEELAH LANG & MIKE YOUNG

Thursday, April 25th, 9pm, Velo Garage & Tap House (1403 Swift St. North Kansas City, MO. 64116)

Jameelah LANG holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston, where she served as Senior Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast and co-organizer for the award-winning Poison Pen Reading Series. Her fiction and nonfiction appear or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, and Witness, and her work has received fellowships and support from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Hub City Writers Project, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and VCCA. She directs graduate-writing programming at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, is a Lecturer at the Kansas City Art Institute, and serves on the board for The Radius of Arab-American Writers. 

 Mike YOUNG is the author of three books: 2014’s Sprezzatura (poetry), 2010's Look! Look! Feathers (stories), and 2010’s We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough, which was selected by readers of The Believer as one of the Top 20 Poetry Books of 2010.

Since 2007, he's run Magic Helicopter Press, which puts out chapbooks and full length books and interactive art. MHP has received nice nods from the New York Times, Nylon, The Rumpus, American Book Review, and others. He lives in Santa Fe, NM, where he makes music: with a band (http://clementinewasright.bandcamp.com/) and by himself (http://blackcake.org/album/imagine-a-fire-you-can-wear-as-a-coat-by-anthony-graytone).

DANNY CAINE, MEGAN KAMINSKI, ALICIA MOUNTAIN & JERMAINE THOMPSON

Saturday, April 13th, 8pm, KCAI Crossroads Gallery: 

Center for Contemporary Practice (1819 Grand Blvd. KCMO) 

Danny CAINE is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast (Mason Jar Press 2019) and El Dorado Freddy's (Collaboration with Tara Wray, Belt Publishing 2020). His poems have appeared in DIAGRAM, Hobart, Barrelhouse, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. He hails from Cleveland and lives in Lawrence, Kansas where he's owner of the Raven Book Store. More: dannycaine.com

Megan KAMINSKI is the author of two books of poetry, Deep City (Noemi Press, 2015) and Desiring Map (Coconut Books, 2012), with a third book Gentlewomen forthcoming from Noemi Press. She is an associate professor in the University of Kansas' Graduate Creative Writing Program and a Keeler Intra-University Professor studying trauma and healing in the School of Social Welfare. She also curates the Taproom Poetry Series in downtown Lawrence. Currently she is working on a book about indeterminacy, attraction, and plant thinking.

Alicia MOUNTAIN is the author of the collection High Ground Coward (Iowa 2018), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Thin Fire (BOAAT Press 2018). She is a lesbian poet, a PhD candidate, and an assistant editor of the Denver Quarterly. Keep up with her at aliciamountain.com and @HiGroundCoward.

Jermaine THOMPSON was born in Louisville, Mississippi. He learned language from big-armed women who greased their pans with gossip and from full-bellied men who cursed and prayed with the same fervor. Jermaine has an M.F.A. in poetry and currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

MIKE KLEINE, JOANNA NOVAK, JOHN TREFRY & CANDICE WUEHLE

Saturday, March 16th, 7pm, KCAI Crossroads Gallery: 

Center for Contemporary Practice (1819 Grand Blvd. KCMO) 

Mike KLEINE is the author of Lonely Men Club and other texts. He grew up in West Africa and graduated from Grinnell College with a BA in French Literature. He currently lives in the Midwest.                                                                                                                                                     

JoAnna NOVAK is the author of the novel I Must Have You and the book-length poem Noirmania. Her writing has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New York Times, the Washington Post, BOMB, Slate, and Guernica. She is a founding editor of Tammy, a literary journal and chapbook press.

John TREFRY is an architect and the author of the books Plats, Thy Decay Thou Seest By Thy Desire, and Apparitions of the Living. His current work-in-progress is called Massive. More diminutive writings have appeared in various other outlets. He is the editor of Inside the Castle, a small press in Lawrence, Kansas.

Candice WUEHLE is the author of the full-length collection BOUND (Inside the Castle Press, August 2018) and the chapbooks VIBE CHECK (Garden-door Press, 2017), EARTH* AIR*FIRE*WATER*ÆTHER (Grey Books Press, 2015) and curse words: a guide in 19 steps for aspiring transmographs, (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). Poems from her collection in progress, DEATH INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, appear in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, The Bennington Review, and The New Delta Review. She is originally from Iowa City, Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Candice currently resides in Lawrence, Kansas where she is a Chancellor’s Fellow at The University of Kansas.

JACOB SAENZ, DAVID WELCH & OMARIS Z. ZAMORA

Saturday, February 16th, 7pm, KCAI Crossroads Gallery: 

Center for Contemporary Practice (1819 Grand Blvd. KCMO) 

Jacob SAENZ is the author of Throwing the Crown, winner of the 2018 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Gregory Pardlo. His work has appeared in PANK, Poetry, Tammy, and other journals. A CantoMundo fellow, he's been the recipient of a Letras Latinas Residency and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. He serves as an associate editor for RHINO.

David WELCH is the author of the collection Everyone Who Is Dead as well as a chapbook, It Is Such a Good Thing to Be In Love with You, and has poems recently published or forthcoming in journals including AGNI, Boston Review, and Pleiades. The recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Welch teaches at DePaul University where he is Assistant Director of Literary Programs and Outreach. Visit him virtually at www.davidwelch.me

Omaris Z. ZAMORA is a transnational Black Dominican Studies scholar. Her research interests include: Black and Latino Studies, transnational Hispanic Caribbean cultural production as they relate to race, gender, and sexuality. Her current book project engages the theoretical formation of AfroLatina feminist epistemologies through an analysis of transnational Dominican women’s narratives in literature and performance. Zamora has presented her research at many conferences, lectures, and roundtables. As a spoken-word poet she fuses her poetry with her scholarly work as a way of contributing to a new black poetic theory of scholarship and literary criticism.

BRETT SALSBURY, CHARLOTTE SELEY & BRAD VOGLER

Saturday, November 3rd, 7pm, KCAI Crossroads Gallery: 

Center for Contemporary Practice (1819 Grand Blvd. KCMO) 

Brett Salsbury currently calls Lawrence, Kansas home, where he recently relocated after living in Las Vegas, Nevada. His creative work has most recently appeared in Causeway Lit, The Poet's Billow, and Posit. In 2017, he served as a short-term writer-in-residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts, and he is now a PhD student at KU where he's working on poems and lyric essays.

CHARLOTTE SELEY is a writer and poet from the Hudson Valley region of New York, currently residing in Kansas City. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and her BA with a concentration in Creative Writing from Eugene Lang College of the New School for Liberal Arts. Her first collection of poetry, The World is My Rival, is on Spuyten Duyvil Publishing.

Brad Vogler is the author of my radius, a small stone (Spuyten Duyvil), i know that this ritual (Lute & Cleat), and three chapbooks: errand: a version of (Meekling Press), Amid the Waves Which (Beard of Bees), and Fascicle 30 (Little Red Leaves Textile Series). His work has appeared in numerous journals including: 1110, Cutbank, Free Verse, Small Po[r]tions, Versal and Volt. He works with Delete Press, Posit, and is the editor/web designer of Opon. Find out more about him at https://bradvogler.com.

KRISTI MAXWELL, PETER MISHLER & RUTH WILLIAMS

Saturday, October 6th, 7pm, KCAI Crossroads Gallery: 
Center for Contemporary Practice (1819 Grand Blvd. KCMO) 

Kristi MAXWELL is the author of six books of poems, including Bright and Hurtless (Ahsahta Press, Oct. 2018). Her poems have most recently appeared in Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, and Bennington Review. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville.

Peter MISHLER is the author of Fludde published by Sarabande Books, and chosen by Dean Young as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. The book was an official selection for The Rumpus Poetry Book Club and was called "must-read poetry" by The Millions. Poems from Fludde have appeared at Conjunctions, Poetry Daily, Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, diode, The Literary Review, and The Winter Anthology. As an editor, he curates a contemporary poetry interview series for Literary Hub.

Ruth WILLIAMS is the author of Flatlands (Black Lawrence Press, 2018) and Conveyance (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English at William Jewell College and an Editor for Bear Review.

CAMERON MORSE, HILARY PLUM & ZACH SAVICH

Thursday, July 19th, 7pm, Open House (4419 State Line Road, Kansas City, Missouri 64111)

Cameron MORSE taught and studied in China. Diagnosed with a glioblastoma in 2014, he holds an M.F.A. from the University of Missouri—Kansas City and lives with his wife Lili and son Theodore in Blue Springs, Missouri. His poems have been published in over 100 different magazines, including New Letters, Bridge Eight, South Dakota Review, I-70 Review and TYPO. His first collection, Fall Risk, is available from Glass Lyre Press. His second, Father Me Again, is forthcoming from Spartan Press.

Hilary PLUM is the author of the novel Strawberry Fields, winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose (2018); the work of nonfiction Watchfires (2016), winner of the 2018 GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction; and the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (2013). She teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program and serves as associate director of the CSU Poetry Center, where she organizes the Lighthouse Reading Series. With Zach Savich she edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press. Recent fiction, essays, poetry, and criticism have appeared in Bookforum, Full Stop, Consequence, Poetry Northwest, the Mississippi Review, the Seneca Review, Big Big Wednesday, and elsewhere.

Zach SAVICH is the author of six books of poetry, including Daybed (Black Ocean, 2018) and The Orchard Green and Every Color (Omnidawn, 2016), and two books of prose, including Diving Makes the Water Deep (Rescue, 2016). He teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, and with Hilary Plum co-edits Rescue Press's Open Prose Series. His work has appeared in journals including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, A Public Space, Kenyon Review, VOLT, jubilat, and Sprung Formal.

ERIN ADAIR-HODGES, MATT MAUCH & JENNY MOLBERG

Saturday, April 21st, 7pm, KCAI Crossroads Gallery: 
Center for Contemporary Practice (1819 Grand Blvd. KCMO) 

Erin Adair-Hodges is the author of Let’s All Die Happy, winner of the 2016 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and published in 2017 as part of the Pitt Poetry Series. A Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholar in Poetry, Sewanee-Claudia Emerson scholar, and winner of the 2014 Loraine Williams Prize from The Georgia Review, her work can be seen in journals such Kenyon Review, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner and more. An educator at all levels for nearly twenty years, she is currently a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Toledo and co-curates the Bad Mouth Reading Series in her hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

Matt Mauch is the author of three books of poetry, Bird~Brian, If You’re Lucky Is a Theory of Mine, and Prayer Book, and also the chapbook The Brilliance of the Sparrow. A Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant recipient and National Poetry Series finalist, Mauch heads the staff at Poetry City, USA, an annual collection of poetry and prose on poetry. He teaches in the AFA in Creative Writing program at Normandale Community College and in the MFA in Poetry program at Concordia University, St. Paul, and lives in Minneapolis.

Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the 2014 Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017) and Refusal (forthcoming, LSU Press). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, Boulevard, and other publications. In 2017, she was the Mark Strand scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference, and will be a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center this May. She teaches creative writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directs Pleiades Press and edits Pleiades magazine.