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.