Selected Reading
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Willa Cather – Red Cloud, Nebraska
Willa Cather & the Pavelka Farmstead—where, writes Christine Pivovar, “I could imagine myself as one of Ántonia’s daughters, kneading the dough for kolaches.”
Willa Cather – Omaha, Nebraska
Willa Cather & Glacier Creek Preserve—where the grass “reflects the fire of a Great Plains sunset.”
Willa Cather – Jaffrey, New Hampshire
Willa Cather & the Old Burying Ground of Jaffrey, New Hampshire—where she was, finally, “dissolved into something complete and great.”
Willa Cather – Chicago, Illinois
Willa Cather & the Fine Arts Building—a respite from the “blur of smoke and wind and noise” in the capital of the Middle Empire.
Kurt Vonnegut – Indianapolis, Indiana
KURT VONNEGUT The Kurt Vonnegut Museum & LibraryIndianapolis, IN By Laura Beadling Like many, I found and loved Kurt Vonnegut somewhere in my miserable teenage years. Slaughterhouse-Five is now one of my favorite novels to teach, whether in Great American Books or...
Ted Kooser – Seward County, Nebraska
TED KOOSER Gravel RoadsSeward County, Nebraska By Matt Miller For all his stature as former U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser remains a poet of Nebraska, and so he is a poet of gravel roads. Consider “So This Is Nebraska,” his best-known poem about his home...
John Joseph Mathews – Osage County, Oklahoma
LiteraryLandscapes: Tallgrass Prairie Preserve—Mason Whitehorn Powell on John Joseph Mathews, Osage identity, and becoming a part of the balance in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.
Robert Hayden – Detroit, Michigan
LiteraryLandscapes: Paradise Valley—Ayesha K. Hardison on artistic signs and negative space in Robert Hayden’s Detroit, Michigan.
William Least Heat-Moon – Columbia, Missouri
Literary Landscapes: River-Horse Pavilion—Kit Salter on departure, preservation, and William Least Heat-Moon’s journeys across America.
Langston Hughes – Lawrence, Kansas
Literary Landscapes: John Edgar Tidwell on Langston Hughes, the merry-go-round, and social segregation in Lawrence, KS
Kate Chopin – St. Louis, Missouri
Literary Landscapes: 4232 McPherson Ave.—Michaella A. Thornton on parenting, criticism, and Kate Chopin’s final home.
F. Scott Fitzgerald – St. Paul, Minnesota
599 Summit Ave.—Ross K. Tangedal on transitions, mediocrity, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s St. Paul, glittering with the newness of life.
Helen Hooven Santmyer – Xenia, Ohio
Greene County Courthouse — Jacob Bruggeman on civic pride and the settler colonial legacy of Helen Hooven Santmyer’s Xenia, Ohio.
Wright Morris – Central City, Nebraska
Wright Morris Boyhood Home, Central City — Nathan Tye on “the ache of a nameless longing” that comes with inhabiting a worn-over world.
Edgar Lee Masters – Petersburg, Illinois
Ann Rutledge’s Grave—Jason Stacy on lost love, Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, and exhuming the legends of Petersburg, Illinois.
Zitkála-Šá – Richmond, Indiana
Earlham Hall — Leah Milne on alienation, determination, and Zitkála-Šá’s time in Richmond, Indiana.
William Gass – St. Louis, Missouri
Devin Thomas O’Shea on everyday hatreds, inside and outside William Gass’s The Tunnel.
Naomi Shihab Nye – Ferguson, Missouri
Central Elementary—Tayler Fox on Naomi Shihab Nye and the effects of imposed divisions in Ferguson, Missouri.
Henry Bellamann – Fulton, Missouri
Henry Bellamann Brick District PlayhouseFulton, Missouri By Alex Dzurick The 1940 novel Kings Row once so offended residents of Fulton, Missouri, that you couldn’t find a copy on the shelves of the local library. You could, however, in the very same town, find a copy...
Vanishing Monuments by John Elizabeth Stintzi
At the newspaper where I worked in college, we were taught that a story’s lead was a story’s everything—This. Happened. The lead was the whole and the start, an incision through which a writer’s needle and thread might penetrate, stringing along all the details to...
Literary Landscapes
Is there a Midwestern author or book that you love? Have you visited their home or made a pilgrimage to their birthplace? Write about that experience!
Hard Truths
Marc McKee’s voice, as it rings through Consolationeer, is equal parts abstract artist, hi-fidelity folk singer, and postmodern priest. The fourth and latest poetry collection from the University of Missouri professor sums our modern spiritual plagues: the desire to...
Cindi Mayweather Ascends
Kansas City native Janelle Monáe’s latest crowns more than a decade of work
Tar Creek, a film on environmental disaster
Native peoples in the United States today often live on ruined, exhausted land, suffering toxic consequences.