MEET THE HOST POETS OF SEASON THREE
By Kathleen Holt
With many thanks to the host poets of Season Two of Poets on the Plains, we welcome five new host poets to Season Three. You may remember that toward the end of each season, each host poet selects a successor, sometimes from the list of featured poets in the season and sometimes a surprise newcomer. Today’s opening features High Plains Morning host Jenny Inzerillo in an interview with Kansas Poet Laureate and Poets on the Plains founder Traci Brimhall.
Each host poet opens the season with one of his own poems, introducing not only themselves, but also their writing philosophies. In a rotating fashion, each poet represents a different state in the High Plains Public Radio’s listening area – Kansas to Nebraska to Colorado to the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles. Once the host poets have introduced themselves, each episode will introduce a featured poet – one of his or her favorites through a PoetryByte that explores a specific poem by the featured poet.
Let’s meet Season Three’s host poets.
First up is Huascar Medina, a poet, editor, essayist, and artist advocate. He served as the poet laureate of Kansas from 2019 to 2022 and was named an Academy of American Huascar Medina Poets Laureate Fellow in 2022. Medina is currently a senior editor at South Broadway Press and a contributing op-ed writer at the Kansas Reflector. Medina is the author of How to Hang the Moon (Spartan Press), Un Mango Grows in Kansas (Spartan Press), Protest as Love Poem (Meadowlark Press), and the forthcoming Prairie Fool (Plainspoken Books, 2027), a collection of lyrical essays addressing politics, class, and culture. His work has been published in the Flint Hills Review, Gasconade Review, Green Mountains Review, Kansas Magazine, Latino Book Review, and The New York Times, among other places.https://huascarmedina.com/
Nebraska’s Brad Aaron Modlin has served for eight years as The Reynolds Endowed Chair of Poetry/Associate Professor at University of Nebraska, Kearney, teaching undergraduates and in the online graduate program. His book Everyone at This Party Has Two Names and his forthcoming No Earth But This are available from Black Lawrence Press. Brad’s work has appeared in The Pushcart Prize; Prairie Schooner; Brevity; The Slowdown; The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; and as the premier episode of Poetry Unbound as well as in orchestral scores, Australian art galleries, Brooklyn public art, and on his neighbor’s refrigerator. He has received support from Sewanee, Banff, & the Nebraska Arts Council. He often writes about hope or embarrassment because he believes in human goodness & is very clumsy at the gym. Find more at https://www.bradaaronmodlin.com/
Our third host poet is Colorado’s Alysse Kathleen McCanna who is the author of FishWife (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the 2025 Colorado Book Award in poetry. Her poetry has appeared in North American Review, The Rumpus, Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, and other journals. Her work has been supported by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tucson Festival of Books, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University, an MFA from Bennington College, and is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Mountain College in the Vail Valley.Visit her website at https://www.alyssemccanna.com/
Our host poet from Oklahoma has a history not only in poetry but also with public broadcasting. Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of over twenty books in poetry, nonfiction and children’s literature. Lansana is Applied Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing and Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, where he is also Director of the African American Studies program and the Media Lab.Lansana is an alumnus of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and was formerly a Lecturer in Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa where he also served as Director of the Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation.
Lansana is Executive Producer of KOSU/NPR’s Focus: Black Oklahoma monthly radio program, which is a recipient of a 2022 duPont-Columbia Award, a 2022 NAACP Image Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists Award and was a Peabody Award nominee. Lansana is also the recipient of a 2022 Emmy Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters Award and a 2022 National Educational Telecommunications Association Public Media Award for his roles as host and consultant for the OETA (PBS) documentary film “Tulsa Race Massacre: 100 Years Later.”
Lansana is a three-time International Regional Magazine Award-winning Contributing Editor for Oklahoma Today magazine. A former faculty member of both the Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
and the Drama Division of
The Juilliard School, Lansana served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and
Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002-2012 and was Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing there until 2014.
His most recent books include Killing the Negative: A Conversation in Art & Verse (with Joel Daniel Phillips), Opal’s Greenwood Oasis, the skin of dreams: new and collected poems, 1995-2018, The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience & Change Agent) and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop. Forthcoming titles include a hybrid biography of Ralph Ellison, a memoir on the last decade of his mentor, Miss Gwendolyn Brooks, and a series of books on the Black Rodeo. Lansana’s work appears in Best American Poetry 2019.
He is a founding member of Tri-City Collective and serves on the Board of Directors of Oklahoma Humanities and the Tulsa Press Club. Lansana is a Curatorial Scholar for The Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art. He is a Cave Canem alumnus and a member of the first cohort of the Culture of Health Leadership Institute for Racial Healing Fellowship. https://www.tricitycollective.com/quraysh-ali-lansana
Representing Texas, Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf 2018) and Seam (SIU 2014). Her writing appears widely both in the United States and abroad and has been translated into several languages. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, three Pushcart prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Arts & Letters, a US Artists Fellowship, and other honors. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas. To find more, visit https://www.tfaizullah.com/tarfia/
