News

For the month of May, we are featuring member Catherine Anderson. Anderson’s most recent collection of poetry is Everyone I Love Immortal (Woodley Press). Other collections are Woman with a Gambling Mania (Mayapple Press), The Work of Hands (Perugia) and In the Mother Tongue (Alice James Books).  A recipient of the Cornelia C. Ward Fellowship in Poetry at Syracuse University where she received an MA in English, she has received awards from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, The Crab Orchard Review and the I-70 Review. In 2019, she was a finalist for the Jake Adam York Auburn Witness Poetry Prize from the Southern Humanities Review. Poems have also appeared in bosque, the Dunes Review, the Laurel Review and other journals. She lives in Kansas City and works at Jewish Vocational Service where she heads programs for spoken language interpreters from the city’s immigrant communities. On the third Monday of the month she facilitates the Poetry Reading Circle sponsored by The Writer’s Place.

Everyone I Love Immortal, Woodley Memorial Press

http://woodleypress.org/books

Woman With a Gambling Mania, Mayapple Pres

http://mayapplepress.com/woman-with-a-gambling-mania-catherine-anderson/

This month, The Writers Place is featuring Wayne Courtois. Wayne has been involved with The Writers Place since 2010, has served as a board member and is currently a member of the TWP Programming Committee.

Wayne is author of the award-winning memoir A Report from Winter, the literary novel Tales My Body Told Me, and the gay erotic novels My Name Is Rand and In the Time of Solution 9. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including The Shining Years, I-70 Review, Hibernation and Other Poems by Gay Bards, and Assaracus (poetry) and Jonathan (fiction) from Sibling Rivalry Press.

Wayne is owner and sole proprietor of The Art of Grants, LLC, and as a grant writer has raised millions for HIV/AIDS services, hospice care, and the arts. He lives in Kansas City with his husband of 32 years, author and translator Ralph Seligman.
 

This month TWP is featuring member William Trowbridge.  Bill has served as a Writers Place board member and is currently a member of TWP programming committee.  William Trowbridge’s ninth poetry collection, The Complete Fool, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2022. His latest, Oldguy Superhero: The Complete Collection, came out from Red Hen in 2019. His other collections are Put this on, Please: New and Selected Poems, Ship of Fool, The Complete Book of Kong, Flickers, O Paradise, and Enter Dark Stranger. His poems have appeared in more than 40 anthologies and textbooks, as well as on The Writer's Almanac, AnAmerican Life in Poetry,  and in such periodicals as Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, Plume, Columbia, Rattle, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Epoch, and New Letters. He lives in the Kansas City area and teaches in the University of Nebraska Low-residency MFA in Writing Program. He was Poet Laureate of Missouri from 2012 to 2016.

If you are a Writers Place member and would like to be featured, please contact Cory Unrein or Maryfrances Wagner. 

The Writers Place is happy to announce a call for submissions for our first audiobook! We’re looking for writers to share their words, be they fiction, poetry, nonfiction, or uncategorizable.

Submissions are free for Writers Place members. There is a $5 per submission fee for non-members. Multiple submissions are welcome.

Once completed, the audiobook will be free to Writers Place members and contributors, and will be available for purchase worldwide.

Guidelines:

Please submit 1-3 .wav files of you reading your work.

Please make sure that each file does not exceed 5 minutes.

At the beginning of each file, please state the title, the author, and then begin reciting your work.

For an example, please visit: https://thewritersplace.bandcamp.com/releases.

Send your submissions to: writersplacesubmissions@gmail.com. All questions can also be sent to that email address.

Payment for the submission fee can be sent by check to:

The Writers Place

31 W. 31^st St.

Kansas City, MO 64108

or electronically via: https://thewritersplace.wildapricot.org/Donate

Once finished, this audiobook will be available for purchase internationally via bandcamp.com.

By submitting, authors grant The Writers Place permission to publish and sell this work for the purposes of this audiobook. Authors retain all rights for their pieces. We only ask that in future publications, authors acknowledge the previous publication of their work in this audiobook.

Good luck! We can’t wait to hear your voices!

The Reading Series Zoom event on July 23rd featuring Mike James, Shawn Pavey, and Alarie Tennille is now available to view on our YouTube channel. 

The board of directors at The Writer's Place stands together in this moment of national reckoning and commits itself to the work of change that lies ahead for each of us and for our nation. 

We know that we cannot go back to life as it was before a Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, or back to the way life was before Louisville police shot Breonna Taylor eight times while she slept in her bed in her apartment. We can never accept the vigilante justice that allowed white men in Georgia to hunt and kill Ahmaud Arbery in cold blood while he was jogging. 

We invite you to join us in this collective journey toward change, to help us educate ourselves and each other toward anti-racism, to inspire each other with our art, to embrace all people of all groups with shared dignity, care, and concern.

We say the names of those we’ve lost to the brutality of racial injustice, we speak out against systems that uphold White supremacy, we acknowledge that we can do more to support diverse voices within our own Kansas City community, we are committed to justice and equity for all, and we believe that Black Lives Matter. 

 

This was the 9th year for In Our Own Words, a youth outreach program sponsored by The Writers Place to provide writing and publishing opportunities for young people in grades 7-12 who are underserved. TWP sent teachers into the schools to provide lessons to over 500 students in 7 schools.  The teachers chose the best student poems for an anthology, and each student and school received a copy. The first week in March, TWP held a writing conference and reading by these students with area writers presenting workshops.  The students read their work for parents, teachers, and the public at The Plaza Library.  Copies of this student anthology are available at TWP. The voices in this book are powerful and heard only because of this program by TWP. 

In light of recent events and growing concerns over the spread of COVID-19, The Writers Place Board of Directors has decided to cancel all events scheduled for the months of March - May. This was a difficult decision to make, but in an effort to practice caution and limit the amount of public gatherings in the city, we felt it was the responsible decision to make as an organization. If you have any questions, please check our website for further details.

 

Read a few books. Write a story or two.

We look forward to seeing you at our events when it is safe to do so.

 

Sincerely,

Board of Directors

The Writers Place

https://thewritersplace.wildapricot.org

Let the beautiful roses in the historic Laura Conyers Smith Municipal Rose Garden inspire your child/student to write an original poem!  The Kansas City Rose Society is now accepting submissions for its Poetry Contest.    How to write:  Each original poem MUST include the word “rose” at least once.  The poem must be typed or legibly hand-written on 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper. -- *Be sure to keep a copy for your child! Only one entry per child, please. The child’s name, school, grade, and city must be included.  Parent’s phone number and email address should be included on the back side of the paper.

Who can enter / 3 categories:  Open to children in the greater KC area. Grades 3 and 4, Grades 5 and 6 Grades 7 and 8​ ​ Winners:    There will be one winner for each category.  Each winner will receive a cash prize of $50.00 and a certificate    Winning poems will be published on the KCRS website in mid-May!

Judges:  poets from Kansas city Writers Place

For more information and to enter, visit https://www.kansascityrosesociety.org/2020-poetry-contest.html.