Hi, I’m Benjamin Myers. I’m a poet from Chandler, Oklahoma, and I’m here to share with you a poem by one of my favorite Oklahoma poets, Jim Barnes. Jim Barnes is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, including Sundown Explains Nothing, Visiting Picasso, and Paris. He has held fellowships from The Rockefeller Foundation, The Camargo Foundation, and The Fulbright Foundation.

For High Plains Public Radio Readers Book Club, I'm Shane Timpson in Colby, Kansas. Today I'm talking about the book Can't Catch Me, I'm the Gingerbread Man by Jamie Gilson, published in 1981.

A trip along the history trail that tells of the settling of the west is littered with the remains of hundreds of ghost towns. The lives of many of these settlements were very brief, as they boomed when they bet on the tracks of the railroads and then busted as they watched from a distance as the trains pass them by. One of the largest communities was called Ivanhoe, and was developed between the Arkansas and Cimarron Rivers on what is now U.S. Highway 83. In this episode, we’ll visit what remains of this once-bustling community – the cemetery.

My name is Emilie Moll, I’m an editorial assistant and book editor for Meadowlark Press, an independent publisher based in Emporia, Kansas. Late last year, I had the privilege of being assigned one of Meadowlark’s latest book projects, a Spring 2025 release called The Immigrant Next Door; Collected Stories of the American Experience, by James Kenyon, and today I’d like to share with you why this project is especially important and worth the read.