Kansas Poet Laureate Traci Brimhall will be at the Iola Public Library at 7 p.m. Thursday (April 3) with “Memory Feast,” a program which unites the state’s agricultural roots with the literary arts.
Brimhall is a university distinguished professor of creative writing and narrative medicine at Kansas State University.
Through fellowships with the National Endowment for the Arts, National Parks Service and Academy of American Poets she’s taught writing workshops in farm schools, art museums, libraries, medical communities and outdoors. She’s also received a Karnes Fellowship through Purdue Library’s Special Collections to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart.
Today, Brimhall is working on a poetry cookbook that brings together the work of poets and chefs from across the state, describing it as “an anthology of nourishments.”
Poets were asked to respond to recipes from all four corners of Kansas, she said, “from urban centers and small towns, from restaurants to farms to food trucks.”
Brimhall has published five collections of poetry, most recently “Love Prodigal” in 2024. Her poems often marry the ordinary with the surreal. They have appeared in journals and magazines such as “The New Yorker,” “Orion,” “The New Republic,” “Poetry,” “The Nation” and “The New York Times Magazine.”
Poet Laureate is a four-year honorary post of the Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission (KCAIC). Brimhall is the state’s eighth poet laureate. Her term will expire in 2026.
April is National Poetry Month.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article had originally misspelled Traci’s name. We apologize for the error.
