KU News Release

Local literary experts to give readings, take part in poetry panel at KU

Jeff Worley

LAWRENCE — A Kansas-born poet, the Kansas City Star’s book editor and a Kansas City-area poetry professor will visit the University of Kansas this month.

Poet Jeff Worley, a Wichita native and graduate of Wichita State University, will present a poetry reading at 3 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 21, in the North Gallery of KU’s Spencer Research Library. Worley, editor of Odyssey magazine, published by the University of Kentucky, has published his poetry in numerous periodicals and is the author of two chapbooks: Natural Selections (with Lance Olsen; Still Waters Press, 1993) and The Other Heart (Devil’s Millhopper Press, 1991). He recently won Atlanta Review’s 2002 International Poetry Competition.

Worley earned his bachelor’s degree in English in 1971 and his master’s in creative writing in 1975, both at WSU.

The Fall Poetry Panel, sponsored by the KU English department, will feature Worley, book editor John Mark Eberhart and poet Stanley Banks, an Avila University artist-in-residence, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 20, in the Gridiron Room in KU’s Burge Union.

Banks, who teaches poetry, fiction and playwriting and African-American literature at Avila in Kansas City, Mo., has received a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship and Kansas City’s Writers Place Award. His poetry collection On 10th Alley Way (1981) won the Langston Hughes Prize. His collection Blue Beat Syncopation (2003) includes selections from the first 25 years of his literary career. He has been published in literary journals, poetry reviews, newspapers and poetry anthologies.

Eberhart, the Star’s book review editor since 2000, has appeared regularly on radio shows in Kansas City and has won numerous journalism awards. In 2002, he won a national award from the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors for his profile of crime fiction writer James Ellroy. He took first place for best entertainment story from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Kansas City chapter for his piece on novelist Antonya Nelson. His professional honors come from the Louisiana Press Association, United Press International, the Missouri Writers Guild and others. His poetry has appeared in Coal City Review, The Same, No. 1, Mid-America Poetry Review, Thorny Locust and New Millennium Writings, and an essay about baseball has appeared in New Letters magazine. His first collection of poetry is Night Watch, published by Mid-America Press in 2005.

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