Hello listeners, I’m Alysse Kathleen McCanna, here for Poets on the Plains. Today I’m thrilled to share a poem with you by Nicky Beer. Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry.

Bonar Menninger's and Hell Followed with It takes readers through several documentary perspectives of the 1966 EF-5 tornado that decimated parts of Topeka. Menninger’s clear interest throughout this book, beginning with the title and epigraph, is attempting to find the “why” and the “how” in the metaphysical explanations residents reached for in the storm's aftermath—the stories people sometimes must tell themselves to make sense of something so catastrophic.

A child born in Vermillion, Kansas, in 1881 and transported by covered wagon into the rugged Oklahoma Territory grew up to become "The Sagebrush Artist”, Oklahoma’s own Grandma Moses.

This is Leslie VonHolten out here on the High Plains of Kansas with another Radio Readers Book Byte. In this day of genre fiction, where we have lanes for romance, fantasy, romantasy, science fiction, climate fiction, speculative—et cetera, you know what I mean—I’m not sure where my current preferences land, label-wise. I like inspiring characters, and bonus points if those characters are women.