CLAYTON ADAM CLARK, JUDITH ROITMAN & CHRIS TONELLI

Saturday, November 9th, 7pm, KCAI Crossroads Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice (1819 Grand Blvd. KCMO)

Clayton Adam CLARK lives in Saint Louis, his hometown, where he works as a public health research scientist and volunteers for River Styx magazine. His debut poetry collection, A Finitude of Skin, won the 2017 Moon City Poetry Award and was published by Moon City Press in November 2018. His poems have recently appeared in Poetry Daily, The Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. He earned the MFA in creative writing at Ohio State University and is studying clinical mental health counseling at University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Judith ROITMAN’s books are No Face (First Intensity Press) and Roswell (theenk Books); her most recent chapbook is Provisional (dancing girl press). Her work has appeared most recently in Equalizer, the tiny, December, Galataea Resurrects, E.Ratio, YEW, Futures Trading, Eleven Eleven, and Otoliths. She lives in Lawrence, KS.

Chris TONELLI is a founding editor of the independent poetry press Birds, LLC and co-director of the NC Book Festival. For thirteen years, he has hosted the So & So Reading Series, and he edits the online So & So Magazine. He works in the Libraries at NC State University and co-owns So & So Books in downtown Raleigh, where he lives with his wife Allison and their kids Miles and Vera. He is the author of five chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections, most recently Whatever Stasis (Barrelhouse Books).

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.