New Letters - On the Air - Audio feed

A longtime resident of Kansas and professor at Washburn University, Thomas Fox Averill lets his numerous interests and passion for research guide his writing of "flyover fiction." His 2001 novel�Secrets of the Tsil Caf� features�southwestern cuisine almost like a character, while the 2003 ...

At just twenty-six, Cheryl Strayed made the impulsive decision to trek the 1100 mile Pacific Crest Trail, alone, and without any previous experience. �Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail�took over twenty years to write and has since been selected by Oprah's Book Club 2.0 and released as a film by Reese Witherspoon's production company. Strayed reads from this memoir and also talks ab...

This show features excerpts from six of our 2013 programs, highlighting the courage and strength of writers who use their gifts with the written word to understand and nurture their fellow man, including Bellwether Prize winner,�Naomi Benaron; MacArthur Genius�Edwidge Danticat;�Winter's Bone�author�Daniel Woodrell; playwri...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of novels, memoirs, and nonfiction, Jane Smiley discusses her 2014 book, Some Luck, the first in a trilogy that follows an Iowa farm family for more than a century, from 1920 and into the future of the 2020s. Smiley talks about what first inspired her to create this multi-volume work and how she went about crafting a realistic family of storytellers through h...

Fiction writer and essayist�Charles Baxter has never shied away from writing about the Midwest. In this interview in front of an audience at the Kansas City Public Library, he reveals some of his motivations for writing short stories and novels. As the fall 2013 Cockefair Chair Writer-in-Residence at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, he also shares advice for burgeoning writers, and talks about the real life inspiration for his 2008 novel,...

Poet Hadara Bar-Nadav views art as a collaboration and a conversation, whether it be with readers, paintings, architecture, music, or sculpture. She refers to many works of art in her 2012 collection�The Frame Called Ruin,�which was the Editors Selection for the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press. In her 2013 collection,...

Filipino-American poet Rick Barot wanted to be a lawyer, but after a writing class with Annie Dillard, when he first heard Jane Kenyon, he knew that he was destined to write poetry. Barot discusses the politics of identity, his disdain of narrative poetry, and the odd way in which repressed memories surface in his work. Barot also talks about the influence of Greek poet George Seferis and reads from his collections...

Vietnam veterans and poets, Bill Bauer and H.C. Palmer reflect on their service and discuss with host Angela Elam how writing has helped them to process the difficult memories. Recorded in front of an audience first at Park University's Meetin' House as a guest of the Warrior Center, and again for Johnson County Community College's ...

For best -selling memoirist and fiction writer Anchee Min, 2014 marks both the 20th anniversary of the publication of her memoir,�Red Azalea�and the paperback release of the next chapter in her harrowing tale,...

Born in Arkansas to artistic "back to the land" parents who were interested in Zen Buddhism, Jonathan Stalling began to seriously study the Chinese language at age 13. Now, he is a translator of Chinese poets such as Shi Zhi and the Editor-in-Chief of Chinese Literature Today at the University of Oklahoma, where he also teaches. Stalling discusses how China's oral poetic tr...

Sergio Troncoso discusses his journey from the small border town of Ysleta to his education at Harvard and eventually Yale, where he now teaches. His collection Crossing Borders: Personal Essays reveals a bit about his life on the Mexican-American border and how it varies from his current life in New York City, where ...

Vermont Poet Laureate Sydney Lea is the author of over a dozen books of poetry, essays, and fiction, including three books published in 2013. Lea won the 1998 Poets Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. The founder of New England Review, he reads for the Writers Series sponsored by the literary magazine, Pleiades at the University of Central M...

Poet Tracy K. Smith, winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Prize for her first collection The Body's Question, reads from her 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning third book,...

Missouri Poet Laureate, William Trowbridge (2012-2014), is the third person appointed since the creation of the position in 2007. In this reading at Rockhurst University's 2014 Midwest Poets Series, Trowbridge reads poems from his numerous books that are now included in his collection of new and selected poems, Put This On, Please. He shares his "Unofficial Missouri Poem" as well as his nod ...

We celebrate National Poetry Month and the beginning of baseball season with poet Martin Espada, who loves baseball as much as poetry. In this public reading for Park University's Ethnic Voices Poetry Series at the Kansas City Public Library, Espada begins with a poem from his earlier book, ...