Events

Midwestern Gothic is a quarterly literary journal published out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, dedicated to featuring work inspired by the Midwest.  A number of Kansas writers have contributed to recent issues of the journal, and have come together to organize this reading, in order to share their work, and express their support for Midwestern Gothic’s mission to “collect the very best in Midwestern writing in a way that has never been done before, cataloging the oeuvre of an often-overlooked region of the United States.” 

Andrew Bales lives in Wichita, Kansas, where he is the Barr Fellow in Wichita State University’s MFA program and the Assistant Editor of mojo. His stories have won second-place in Glimmer Train’s 2011 Short Story Award for New Writers and have appeared or are forthcoming in New Delta Review, Bateau, NANO Fiction, Johnny America, and other journals. His story “Pancake People” appeared in Issue 3 of Midwestern Gothic.

Kara M. Bollinger is a graduate student at the University of Kansas, where she is pursuing her Master's in Rhetoric and Composition and serves as the assistant nonfiction editor of Beecher's Magazine.  Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Sleet Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, Prick of the Spindle, and The Connecticut Review.

Benjamin Cartwright is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Kansas.  His work has appeared in Sentence, DMQ Review, Stone Telling, and other fine places.  Ben hopes that coastal people keep flying over Kansas, so that it stays a secret, like a fort you build in the backyard, or the afterlife.  We don’t need any more riffraff.  Actually, we do.  Bring the riffraff.  Bring it. 

Mary Stone Dockery is the author of Mythology of Touch (Woodley Press), a poetry collection, and two chapbooks, Aching Buttons (Dancing Girl Press) and Blink Finch (Kattywompus Press), all forthcoming in 2012. Her poetry and prose is forthcoming in Gargoyle, South Dakota Review, Weave Magazine, and has appeared in many fine journals. She is the 2011 recipient of the Langston Hughes Award in Poetry and co-edits Blue Island Review. She lives and writes in Lawrence, Kansas.

Katie Longofono is very close to finishing her undergraduate degree in creative writing at the University of Kansas. She plans to pursue an MFA in poetry at whichever institution threatens her with the least amount of debt. Her work has been published in Midwestern Gothic, The Medulla Review, and other journals; her first chapbook, The Angel of Sex, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She is the founding editor of Blue Island Review, and poetry editor of the KU literary/art & design magazine Kiosk. In 2011 she received the William Herbert Carruth Memorial Poetry Prize.

Jason Ryberg is the author of seven books of poetry,
six screenplays, a few short stories, several angry
letters to various magazine and newspaper editors,
and a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper
that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel. He is currently an artist-in-residence at The Prospero Institute of Disquieted Poetics and an aspiring b-movie actor. His latest collection of poems is Down, Down and Away
(co-authored with Josh Rizer and released by Spartan Press). He lives in Kansas City, Missouri, with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe. Feel free to look up his skirt at jasonryberg.blogspot.com.

Leah Swewell is a Chicago native living in Topeka, Kansas. She is the founding editor of XYZ Magazine, a freelance graphic designer and the founder and mediator of the Topeka Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in journals including Flint Hills Review, Blue Island Review, Coal City Review and Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems.