In Store Event with Thomas Fox Averill and Leslie VonHolten

Thomas Fox Averill is professor emeritus of English at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, where he taught creative writing and Kansas studies. He is an O. Henry Award short-story winner and author of ten books. His introduction to What Kansas Means to Me: Twentieth Century Writers on the Sunflower State (1991) was titled “Afflicted with Affection,” and he remains so. In 2010 he created the Thomas Fox Averill Kansas Studies Collection at Washburn’s Mabee Library.

Leslie VonHolten writes about land and culture in the prairie and Great Plains regions. She is a 2022 Tallgrass Artist Residency fellow and long-time commentator on High Plains Public Radio in Garden City, Kansas. Her recent essays have been published in The New Territory, Literary Landscapes, and The Dark Mountain Project. She lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with her husband, Tim, and their misbehaving dogs and garden.

An anthology of poetry and prose from thirty-five of today’s leading literary voices from the Sunflower State, brought together to explore how Kansas makes us feel and why we’re proud to call it home.

Kansas Matters gathers thirty-five of the state’s leading literary voices to offer profound insights into the feelings that Kansas evokes. This living map of personal geographies and histories draws on the rich emotions and memories that bind Kansans to the Sunflower State.

Brought together in a new anthology of thirty-five poems, essays, and short fiction, these writers reflect on twenty-first-century Kansas: on the beauty of the land and the fight for its preservation; the divisions of identity and the belonging of home; the context of our history and our hopes for the future.

These contemporary voices show us Kansas as we know it to be and Kansas as we want it to be—a complex, emotional, and inspiring assertion of why Kansas matters.

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