Norma Cantu, professor of English and Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, reads "43 Students"

Norma Cantu: "43 Students"

Kelly Cannon's poem "Chiaroscuro" was inspired by a painting of a man sitting on a bed looking out a window — it reminded her of taking naps when she was a child. "There's something so different about going to sleep during the day," she says. "The light is so different."

Kelly Cannon: "Chiaroscuro"

After a nursing career of nearly 40 years, Topeka poet Annette Hope Billings retired in early 2015 to write full-time. She has said she feels as if “writing is a form of nursing using words.” 

Annette Hope Billings: "Ingress"

John Willison started writing poetry after his cancer metastasized and he joined a writing group at Turning Point, a center with programs for people with serious illness. The group is led by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, a former poet laureate of Kansas.

John Willison: "Peaches"

Jeanette Powers' poem, "Carousel," is included in her second collection of poems, Earthworms & Stars, published in 2015 by Spartan Press. 

Jeanette Powers: "Carousel"

Kansas writer Sarah Smarsh reads from her July 2015 essay at NewYorker.com. Her book "In the Red," a memoir of the American working poor as seen through her own turbulent upbringing in rural Kansas, is forthcoming from Scribner.  

Sarah Smarsh: An Excerpt From "Poverty, Pride, and Prejudice"

"The dog is truly a metaphor for myself," says Appelquist, "growing up with a big chip on your shoulder, being poor and uneducated...and then finding yourself coping well, and just being in the world, but feeling like you're missing a thing."

Iris Appelquist: "the dog"

This poem is included in Appelquist's 2015 chapbook, "while we were we were there." She says it's about her growing relationship with her young daughter and also, indirectly, about her own mother. 

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Mark Thomas Hennessy

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