Hi, I’m Quraysh Ali Lansana, a poet, author and professor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, here for Poets on the Plains. Today, I’m delighted to explore a poem of my own that speaks to an intersection of two significant aspects in Oklahoma history.

I’m Megan Hope, a native Southwest Kansan (currently living in the Missouri Ozarks) and proud supporter of HPPR. A book I think will resonate with many High Plains listeners is All the Living, by C.E. Morgan, published in 2009 by Picador and widely available at libraries and booksellers.

A conventional description of the Great Plains landscape of Kansas may include references to open skies, treeless flatlands, rolling hills of shortgrass and mixed-grass prairies, and colors tending toward tan and brown. However, when we look at areas in Southwest and South-Central Kansas, the former description may not always fit. Located mostly in Clark, Comanche and Barber counties along the southern border of Kansas, there exists a physiographic province known as the Red Hills. This undulating terrain of red-tinted sediments comes from an underlying geological structure that developed when the Great Plains spanned an ancient ocean.

This is Tracy Million Simmons, owner of Meadowlark Press in Emporia, Kansas, for High Plains Public Radio Reader’s Summer Reading List. As a regional press specializing in stories from the Midwest, I’d like to take this moment to introduce you to our newest memoir, Reptile Romance, by Harley Elliott.