Big Read

Writer and director David Wayne Reed revives Shelf Life, his popular show-and-tell storytelling series, for Big Read 2025. The event – focusing on soma, or the body – features five new stories from Reed, Big Read featured author Rebekah Taussig, musician and amputee advocate Billy Brimblecom, poet Canese Jarboe, and vi...

Rebekah Taussig discusses her book Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary, Resilient, Disabled Body. The author, who lost the use of her legs as a toddler, talks about the public consequences of ignoring differences in ability; everyone, she says, lives in a body with limitations, so conversations about accessibilit...

Kansas Citian Rebekah Taussig reads her new children’s book, We Are the Scrappy Ones, an ode to those who navigate a world that isn’t designed with them in mind. The book says that the variation among the community of different bodies is part of what makes it so strong. Contribute to a collaborative art project inspire...

Indigenous artists featured in the Library exhibition The Heart Is a Fist talk about their inspirations and techniques in a panel discussion moderated by Kreshaun McKinney, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s director of learning and engagement. The program and exhibition are part of the Library’s Big Read 2022....

Participants from Glenn North’s May 1 poetry workshop take the stage to share their work. The readings draw heavily from U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s themes of memory, homeland, tribal history, and Native rights in her book An American Sunrise, the centerpiece of the Libr...

Amid the Library’s Big Read 2022, a two-month celebration of reading and poetry, Kansas City poet Glenn North conducts a multi-generational workshop for those wanting to try their hand at verse and those looking to hone their poetry-writing skills. The session draws heavily from U.S. P...

Using clips of movies from 1998’s seminal Smoke Signals to present-day releases, film and media history scholar Joanna Hearne examines the significance and impact of some of the more recent Indigenous filmmakers and their work. Her presentation is part of Big Read 2022, revolv...

An elderly Native American couple make their last journey together – to Wewoka, capital of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. Frankie is dying and intent on seeing his estranged daughter and a grandchild he has never met. Irene, whom he left years earlier, has chosen to be a loving companion on the trip. Their poi...

Written and directed by Mi’gmaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby, Rhymes for Young Ghouls offers an unflinching fictional account of Indigenous agency in the face of the horrors of Canada’s Indian residential schools. The 2013 drama (R, 88 min.) continues a series of film screenings in conjunctio...