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Missouri's First Poet Laureate

By Scott Spilky   As the state’s first poet laureate, Ashland native Walter Bargen has crisscrossed the state speaking, reading his work, and championing the power of words to move the imagination.   “Poems are more relevant than they have ever been,” he says.   Walter, the award-winning author of eleven books, has been writing for nearly thirty years. His work has appeared in more than one hundre…... Read more >

Nordies at Noon

By Anita Neal Harrison

When Kim Carlos, a native of Hallsville, found a lump in her breast at age thirty, she called Patti Balwanz, a friend she made at Missouri State University at Springfield. Patti, who’s from Columbia, could empathize because she had found a lump at age twenty-four. She could also introduce Kim to two more young women fighting breast cancer: Jana Peters and Jennifer Johnson, both diagnosed at age twenty-seven.

Kim…... Read more >