Artspeak Radio celebrates National Poetry Month 2023

Artspeak Radio, Wednesday, noon – 1pm CST, 90.1fm KKFI Kansas City Community Radio, streaming live audio www.kkfi.org

Producer/host Maria Vasquez Boyd celebrates National Poetry Month 2023 with poets/writers Mary Silwance, Maryfrances Wagner, Erin Adair-Hodges.

National Poetry Month 2023
Launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996, National Poetry Month is a special occasion that celebrates poets’ integral role in our culture and that poetry matters. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K–12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, families, and—of course—poets, marking poetry’s important place in our lives.

As a special offering this April, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón has selected twenty new poems by contemporary poets to be featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series as part of a collaboration with the Library of Congress. Thanks in part to our National Poetry Month partners and sponsors, each April the Academy is able to offer activities, initiatives, and resources so that anyone can join the celebration:
• Order (for free) and display the official National Poetry Month poster
• Learn how to celebrate at home
• Learn how to celebrate in the classroom
• Join the Academy of American Poets for its virtual Poetry & the Creative Mind gala
• Find poetry readings and events on our Poetry Near You calendar, and add your own
• Encourage students in grades five through twelve to participate in the Dear Poet Project
• Sign up for Poem-a-Day and enjoy a free daily poem in your inbox curated this April by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón
• Follow the thousands of celebrations taking place on social media with the official hashtag #NationalPoetryMonth and follow the Academy of American Poets on Twitter and Instagram @POETSorg
• Share a #PocketPoem on Poem in Your Pocket Day
• Make a gift to the Academy of American Poets
• Add the official National Poetry Month logo to your events
www.poets.org/national -poetry-month

MARY SILWANCE – Originally from Egypt, I live in Kansas City where I make my home with three daughters who daily inspire me to evolve. My life trajectory has taken many paths: I have worked as an English teacher, a stay-at-home mom, a farmhand, and a farm to school coordinator. I have worked in environmental education and green infrastructure. I’m currently an herbalism apprentice. What has been a constant through all those vocations? Writing! I am an award-winning internationally published writer active in Kansas City’s writing scene. I serve on the editorial team of Kansas City Voices, conduct writing workshops and am a recent attendee of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference. I also blog about environmental issues from the intersection of justice and spirituality and provide ecological workshops based on my research, writing and communion with nature. What am I discovering through my rich, varied experiences? The imagination at play is emancipatory medicine through which we create community: with ourselves, each other and Earth.
www.marysilwance.com

MARYFRANCES WAGNER’S newest books are The Silence of Red Glass, The Immigrants’ New Camera, and Solving for X. Her newly reissued book Red Silk won the Thorpe Menn Book Award. She co-edits I-70 Review, is president of The Writers Place board, was 2020 Missouri Individual Artist of the Year, and is Missouri Poet Laureate 2021-2023. Poems have appeared in New Letters, Midwest Quarterly, Laurel Review, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry East, Green Mountain Literary Review, Voices in Italian Americana, Main Street Rag, Rattle, Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, et. al. For more information: www.maryfranceswagnerwriter.fieldinfoserv.com

ERIN ADAIR-HODGES is the author of Let’s All Die Happy, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and Every Form of Ruin, both from the Pitt Poetry Series. Recipient of the Allen Tate Prize and the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, her work has been featured in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, and more. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the Adirondack Center for Writing, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, and Vermont Studio Center. Born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, she now lives with her family in Kansas City, Missouri, and works as a fiction acquisitions editor.
www.erinmolly.com

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