Riverfront Reading Series

The Riverfront Readings series of poetry and fiction readings was started in Kansas City, Missouri in 1986 by Philip Miller and Donn Blevins. In those days, the location actually was in the Riverfront area, in the Kansas City Artists Coalition space. Now they are held at The Writers Place and in other Kansas City area locations.

Rhiannon Ross hosts June’s Riverfront Reading Series with music by Saffie Bettis.

Brian Shawver is the author of the novels The Cuban Prospect and Aftermath, and the nonfiction books The Language of Fiction and Danger on the Page. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has taught at Boston University, Northeastern University, and Missouri State University. He currently serves as Chair of the English Department and Associate Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Park University.

Brandon Whitehead is originally from Oklahoma, where there are generally only two accepted ways in which a man may express himself: silence or rage. He studied violin at the University of Kansas. Yes. Violin. Brandon has been a furniture mover, a short-order cook, a movie and music reviewer, a bartender, a camera operator for a local news station, a warehouse foreman for a blood bank, and a courier of bio-hazardous materials. He lives in KCKS, in a tiny apartment that doesn’t adhere to normal Euclidian geometry. He spends his nights writing poems and stories while listening to the strange old man that lives above him play the violin.

Fiction writer Diane Willie is from the Navajo tribe of New Mexico. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Education and is a graduate of both Haskell Indian Nations University and the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Diane is currently an instructor at the Native American Community Academy in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she enjoys teaching native literature to her students. Her favorite authors are Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich.