For the past several weeks, the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club has been exploring something that shapes our lives every day, whether we notice it or not: wind and weather. Here on the High Plains, we know something about both.

Hello listeners, I’m Alysse Kathleen McCanna, here for Poets on the Plains. Today I’m excited to share a poem with you by a wonderful poet I’m lucky to call friend, Danny Rosen.

Hello Radio Readers! This is Marit coming to you from western Lane County with a Radio Readers BookByte about The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin. This tragic story reminds me of a particularly bad winter storm we had when I was in high school in the early 2000s.

The western Oklahoma town of Cheyenne rests near ground scarred by a painful history. It was here, in late 1868, that Lieutenant Colonel George Custer led a dawn assault on the peace-seeking Southern Cheyenne village of Chief Black Kettle—an event once widely chronicled as a "battle," but now recognized as the Washita Massacre. Decades after, the town named for those displaced people found itself locked in a different kind of survival story: an early-20th-century rivalry for regional dominance.

In 1902, my great-great-grandfather H.B. Kliewer gained his U.S. citizenship. He had been living in Hillsboro, Kansas, ostensibly orphaned when his father died shortly after the family emigrated from Russia in the late 1880s. Until a few days ago, I had only a vague outline of this story. I knew my family had emigrated from Russia as part of the larger Mennonite migration discussed in David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard, but I was unfamiliar with the texture of this family’s settler story.

Tune in this week to enjoy two compositions, one featuring a harpsichord and the other a piano!

Some folks might be able to skip watering during the winter where they live...but here on the High Plains, you'd do well to keep an eye on the moisture in your soil, or things might get a bit more dry than your trees would like!

I am Martin Fulmer from Goodwell, OK, here for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2026 Fall Read. Growing up in the Carolinas, I never thought of blizzards as part of my weather vocabulary. Hurricanes, yes. But blizzards belonged somewhere else. Melanie Benjamin’s The Children’s Blizzard reminded me that weather has a way of making such distinctions meaningless.

Welcome to Poets on the Plains, I’m Brad Aaron Modlin. This poem is by Rayni K. Wekluk. Let’s start with the title: “The Railroad Brought Us Here.” Us as collective—the inhabitants who arrived to The Great Plains in train cars.

For High Plains Public Radio Readers Book Club, I'm Shane Timson in Colby, Kansas. Today we're talking about the book The Children's Blizzard, by David Laskin. This is about the 1888 blizzard. It affected three states, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota.