Start off the Midwest Poet Series season with Wayne Miller and Maryfrances Wagner! 

Wayne Miller is the author of six poetry collections, most recently "The End of Childhood" (Milkweed, 2025) and "We the Jury" (2021). His awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Poetry Foundation, as well as the UNT Rilke Prize, two Colorado Book Awards, two Pushcart Prizes, six individual awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, and a Fulbright Scholarship to the Seamus Heaney Centre in Northern Ireland. He has co-translated into English two books by the Albanian writer Moikom Zeqo—most recently "Zodiac" (Zephyr, 2015), which was shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation—and his own collection of selected poems, translated into Polish by Piotr Florczyk, has just been published in Poland. He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, co-directs the Unsung Masters Book Series, and edits the literary journal Copper Nickel.

Maryfrances Wagner’s newest books are "The Immigrants’ New Camera," "Solving for X," and "Backstories." She co-edits I-70 Review, is president of The Writers Place, was 2020 Missouri Individual Artist of the Year, and was Missouri’s 6th Poet Laureate from 2021-2023. "Red Silk" won the Thorpe Menn book award, was first runner up in the Eric Hoffer legacy award 2024 (reissued in 2023), and was a top five finalist for the Grand Prize for poetry. Her poems have appeared in New Letters, Midwest Quarterly, Laurel Review, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry East, Voices in Italian Americana, Main Street Rag, Rattle, Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (Penguin), Literature Across Cultures (Pearson/Longman), et. al. In the Emily Dickinson garden at the Overland Park Arboretum & Botanical Gardens, a bench has been named in her honor, and the Warrensburg Parks & Recreation department has posted two of her poem along their walking trail.