Kansas Day is Saturday, Jan. 29, and this year is the Sunflower State’s sesquicentennial. There are dozens of events taking place statewide, all year long, to celebrate, and some even have a literary bent. Here are a few Kansas Day events for readers and writers, and you can find more at www.ks150.org.
Jan. 29: Postcards from Home: Images and Poetics from Kansas, a 150th Event
6-9 p.m., Warehouse 414, 414 SE 2nd St., Topeka
An all Kansas-inspired art and poetry event.
Feb. 14: Literature with Lunch: What Kansas Means to Me, edited by Thomas Fox Averill
1 p.m., Shawnee County Public Library, 1515 SW 10th Ave., Topeka
Discuss this year’s choice for Kansas Reads 2011. Thirteen essayists and four poets try to map the spiritual topography of Kansas and explain why this particular patch of prairie is so dear. They share the conviction that Kansas represents something powerful, something significant, something noteworthy. Read and discuss the book, or attend and listen to learn more.
Feb. 17: Kansas Poems of William Stafford, ed. by Denise Low
7 p.m., Lawrence Public Library, 707 Vermont St., Lawrence
“Kansas at 150” TALK book discussion presented by the Kansas Humanities Council.
William Stafford may have been named Oregon’s poet laureate, but he was a Kansas boy at heart — born in Hutchinson — and his youth in Kansas deeply inflected his poetry. “Mine was a Midwest home — you can keep your world,” he proclaimed in his poem “One Home.” Stafford’s poetry is rooted in a sense of place, and the work in this collection shows how Kansas as a place continued to inform his thought and verse.