Maryfrances Wagner

Maryfrances Wagner’s books include Salvatore’s Daughter (BkMk) Red Silk (MidAm), Light Subtracts Itself (MidAm), Dioramas (Mammoth), Pouf (FLP), The Silence of Red Glass, The Immigrants' New Camera (Spartan), and Solving for X (Spartan). Red Silk won the Thorpe Menn Book Award for Literary Excellence. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines including New Letters, Midwest Quarterly, Laurel Review, Birmingham Review, Louisville Review, Poetry East, River Styx, Tar River Review, Rattle, et. al., anthologies and textbooks including Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (Penguin Books) and The Dream Book, An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation). Work from that book was chosen for American Audio Prose and was translated into Italian for Trapani Nuovo in Italy. She is the co-editor of The I-70 Review, president of The Writers Place, and the co-editor of the Whirlybird Anthology of Greater Kansas City Writers. She was the Missouri Individual Artist of the Year for 2020 and the 6th Missouri Poet Laureate 2021-2023 where she produced Podcasts and projects to promote Missouri poets and to reach people across the state who don't usually read poetry.