CELEBRATING NATIONAL POETRY MONTH, the library hosts Traci Brimhall, Kansas Poet Laureate, Thurs., April 3 at 7 p.m.
Traci Brimhall is a university distinguished professor of creative writing and narrative medicine at Kansas City University. She is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon Press, 2024).
Known for her poems that often marry the ordinary with the surreal, Brimhall’s work has appeared widely in journals and magazines such as The New Yorker, Orion, The New Republic, Poetry, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine.
Through fellowships with the National Endowment of the Arts, National Parks Service, and Academy of American Poets she’s taught writing workshops in farm schools, art museums, libraries, medical communities, and the outdoors. She’s also received a Kansas Fellowships through Purdue Library’s Special Collections to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart.
She is the current poet laureate of Kansas, where her initiatives have centered on uniting the state’s agricultural roots with the literary arts. Through poetry cookbooks, food-based mad lib poems, and bringing poetry to the State Fair, her literary arts advocacy seeks ways to bring the nourishment of language to all Kansans.
Her topic is “Memory Feast”. She is currently working on a cookbook that combines poetry and recipes from across the state–she calls it “an anthology of nourishments”.