It's Poetry Time — The Kansas City Public Library Invites You To Listen, Read, or Pick Up A Pen

This article first appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of KC Studio Magazine.

Poetry and poets do a lot of work. Alison Rollins’ collection Black Bell, for instance, does a tremendous amount. 

The collection, which won the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award, takes its title from the 18th and 19th-century practice of enslavers rigging bells to the enslaved to prevent escape. The book is rich in graphics, such as diagrams, lithographs, ancient advertisements, and shape poems.

Yet even as the poems contend with a horrifying past, the award’s guest judge still found them to hold an “exceptional blend of formal craft, lyricism, music, and humor.

“Rollins confronts a dark history but does so with a ferocity that kept me glued to the pages,” says Taylor Byas, a previous winner of the award. “I gasped, I cried, I laughed, I read the poems aloud, and danced along with their music.” 

On March 11 at the Kansas City Public Library’s Central location, Rollins, a St. Louis native, kicks off a tour of partner organizations: the University of Missouri-Kansas City-The Carolyn Benton Cockefair Chair in Continuing Education, the University of Missouri-Columbia, Missouri State University, and Northwest Missouri State, Truman State, and Southeast Missouri State universities. RSVP here. 

Through May 7, Kansas City poet and artist José Faus’ work is on display, also at the Central location. Like Rollins’ collection, his 10 new blackout poems — printed and framed — take on much more than meter and rhyme. 

In the exhibition We Hold These Truths, Faus uses the Declaration of Independence as his jumping off place. In two-by-two-foot frames, he redacts bits of text to create poems that could be read as subversive, and in doing so, prompts fresh interpretation and invites readers to reflect on our shared history and future. 

Kansas Citians have an open invitation to writing classes at the library — including several poetry sessions — if they’d like to engage in the hard work of poetry, too.