midwest

John T. Price reads from two memoirs: Man Killed by Pheasant and Other Kinships (2008) and Daddy Long Legs: The Natural Education of a Father (2013).

David Wagoner reads primarily from Staying Alive (1966) and New and Selected Poems (1969).

Alan Heathcock reads from the collection Volt: Stories (2011).

William Kloefkorn reads from Uncertain the Final Run to Winter (1974), Alvin Turner As Farmer (1974), loony (1975), ludi jr (1976), Stocker (1978), Leaving Town (1979), and Not Such a Bad Place to Be (1980).

Stephen Dunn opens with poems from Full of Lust and Good Usage (1976), which would be published the year following this reading. He then reads from Looking for Holes in the Ceiling (1974) before closing with poems that would later appear in A Circus of Needs (1978).

Patricia Hampl opens with two poems, "The Moment" and "Last Letter." Then she reads the essay "Pilgrimage" from her book Spillville (1986), as well as two excerpts from her memoir A Romantic Education (1981). At this event, Hampl also read from Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life (1992), but this portion of her reading was not recorded.

Alan Cheuse reads from his novel The Light Possessed (1990), inspired by the life of Georgia O'Keefe and several other U.S. women painters. The novel's title comes from a poem by Walt Whitman, "A Prairie Sunset," which Cheuse reads as an introduction to his own work. Cheuse's novel has "two beginnings," and he reads both: the first is a chapter titled "River."

Poet David Baker gives a collaborative performance alongside Lauren Baba, Andrew Rowan, Alina Roitstein, Harrison Kirk, and Gregory Uhlmann of the River Song Quintet, who perform musical settings of his poems. Included in this performance are uncollected and new poems, as well as poems from Baker's collections The Truth about Small Towns (1998) and Scavenger Loop (2015).

Adam O. Davis reads from his first book, Index of Haunted Houses (2020), which inhabits the ghostly landscape of American capitalism. He closes with several poems from an unpublished manuscript. This reading was originally given with Manuel Paul López.

Mark Wunderlich opens by reading from his fourth collection, God of Nothingness (2021), before turning to recently written poems. He shares work that centers on the body, animals, violence, and the complex inheritances arising from lineage and place.