Artspeak Radio with Shawn Pavey and Maryfrances Wagner

Artspeak Radio, Wednesday, September 15, 2021, noon – 1pm CST, 90.1fm KKFI Kansas City Community Radio, streaming live audio www.kkfi.org
Producer/host Maria Vasquez Boyd welcomes poet Shawn Pavey and Missouri Poet Laureate Maryfrances Wagner.

SHAWN PAVEY is the author of Talking to Shadows (Main Street Rag Press, 2008), Nobody Steals the Towels From a Motel 6 (Spartan Press, 2015), and Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse (2019, Spartan Press) which was 1st runner up for the 2020 Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. He co-founded The Main Street Rag Literary Journal and served as an Associate Editor. His infrequently updated blog is at www.shawnpavey.com. His books can be purchased from him signed and/or personalized at https://shawn-pavey-poet.square.site/ or wherever one prefers to buy books online (but if you buy them from the author, Jeff Bezos doesn’t get any richer and the author actually sees some money).

MARYFRANCES WAGNER – Governor Michael L. Parson has appointed Independence poet, teacher, and community arts leader Maryfrances Wagner as Missouri’s sixth Poet Laureate. She will serve from July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2023.
The Missouri Poet Laureate enriches Missourians’ lives throughout the state by fostering the reading and writing of poetry, through public appearances, readings, workshops, and digital and social media. “As Poet Laureate,” Ms. Wagner says, “I’d like to find ways to reach out to people who don’t usually read poetry or even think they like it.”
Ms. Wagner has published nine collections of her poetry, most recently “The Immigrants’ New Camera” (2018). Other books include “Salvatore’s Daughter,” “Light Subtracts Itself,” “Dioramas,” “Pouf,” “The Silence of Red Glass,” and “Red Silk,” which won the 2000 Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. Her poems have also appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies.
Ms. Wagner has co-edited several poetry anthologies and the New Letters Review of Books. She has co-edited I-70 Review magazine since 2010.
Her poetry “is accessible in the best sense of the world—straightforward, lucid, concrete,” says William Trowbridge, Missouri Poet Laureate 2012-16. Her poems, says Arizona poet and author Gary Gildner, bring readers “stunning moments with children, with family and feelings, the stuff of this world unfolding as natural and necessary as a flower—the loves and losses, the albums in the attic, the meals of ravioli—stories simple and splendid.”
In 2020, Ms. Wagner was named the Individual Artist honoree for our Missouri Arts Awards, the state’s highest honor in the arts.
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