The Writers Place Reading Series presents Robert Lowes, Mary Silwance, and Kimball Smith

Robert Lowes is the author of two collections of poetry: Shocking the Dark (Kelsay Books, 2024), and An Honest Hunger (Resource Publications, 2020). His poems have appeared in journals such as The New Republic, December, Tampa Review, Big Muddy, Delta Poetry Review, The Christian Century, Southern Poetry Review, Modern Haiku, and The Journal of the American Medical Association. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Born in Egypt, Mary Silwance lives in Kansas City and is the mother of three daughters. She has been an English teacher, Farm to School Coordinator, an environmental educator, and a farmhand. Mary provides writing workshops, serves on the editorial team of Kansas City Voices, was the 2023 Poetry Editor-in-Residence for Flying Ketchup Press where she is co-editor of the Room of One’s Own anthology, a retrospective of women’s embodied experiences as well as co-creator of Poetry Jam, a poetry festival designed for everyone along the poetic spectrum. Mary is also an adjunct writing instructor at KCAI and teaches adult EAL at Penn Valley. Lastly, Mary explores ecology from an intersection of justice and spirituality in workshops and writing. While her poetry and essays appear in numerous publications, her work, chapbooks, radio and zoom presentations as well as workshop offerings are available at https://www.marysilwance.com. When not writing, Mary is gardening, hiking, thrifting, or dreaming about her off-grid village. We Remember Ourselves is Mary’s first full length collection of poetry. 

D. K. Smith was educated at Yale and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has worked as a short-order cook, a Kodak film processor, a dish-washer, a London stringer for Newsweek, a furniture mover, a reporter, a secretary, and a telephone receptionist. He has cooked duck a l'orange for thirty-five people and hors d'oeuvres for a hundred. He is the author of three previous novels, Nothing Disappears, Missing Persons, and Bunny, a romance, and a book on Renaissance Cartography. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and teaches medieval and Renaissance literature at Kansas State University.