Missouri Poet Laureate William Trowbridge Visits Midwest Poets Series

William Trowbridge, who will soon complete his two-year term as Missouri’s poet laureate, will present his poems at 7 p.m., Tuesday, March 11, in Mabee Theater as the final event of this season’s renowned Midwest Poets Series. This will be the Kansas City inaugural reading of Trowbridge’s Put This On, Please: New & Selected Poems (Red Hen Press, 2014).

Trowbridge has been a longtime Missouri resident, living mostly in the Maryville area until relocating to Lee’s Summit and establishing his reputation as one of the finest poets in the United States.

Trowbridge’s poems appear in anthologies, textbooks and magazines like Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review and New Letters. He has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Pushcart Prize, a Bread Loaf scholarship and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo.

“I laughed out loud reading William Trowbridge’s collection Ship of Fool,” says United States Poet Laureate—and Midwest Poets Series alumna—Natasha Trethewey. “As with the best humor,” Trethewey continues, “mirth and despair are twinned here.”

Trowbridge teaches in the University of Nebraska low-residency MFA in writing program and is a distinguished university professor emeritus at Northwest Missouri State University, where he was an editor of The Laurel Review/GreenTower Press from 1986 to 2004.

Admission is $3 at the door; no one will be denied admission for lack of funds. Books will be available for purchase at the event; a reception and book signing follow the reading. Mabee Theater is located in Sedgwick Hall on Rockhurst University’s campus, 54th Street and Troost Avenue. For more information, call The Center for Arts and Letters, 816-501-4607.