When Zoe Fay-Stindt and Allyson Whipple were disappointed that the ongoing pandemic meant that they couldn't visit or meet up at a poetry festival, they decided to bring the road trip online. They decided to co-host a reading series featuring one poet from every state (Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Iowa), as a way to celebrate different poets from that hypothetical journey. This event features Cindy Huyser (TX), Ken Hada (Oklahoma), Dottie Joslyn (Missouri) and Jennifer Knox (Iowa).

This event is open to all. If you have the means, please consider making a donation of any amount. Donations will be split among our featured readers. If you cannot donate and run into a registration hiccup, please contact co-host Allyson Whipple at allyson@allysonwhipple.com for assistance.

Cindy Huyser’s poems have received Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations, and appear in many journals and anthologies. Her chapbook, Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems, was co-winner of the 2014 Blue Horse Press Poetry Chapbook Contest, and her first full-length collection, Cartography, is forthcoming from 3: A Taos Press. She has edited or co-edited a number of anthologies, including Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2016) and several editions of the Texas Poetry Calendar. Cindy has been a juried performer for the Houston Poetry Fest, Houston’s Public Poetry series, and the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, and lives in Austin, Texas, where she hosts the monthly BookWoman 2nd Thursday Poetry Reading and Open Mic series.

Ken Hada lives in rural Pottawatomie County in Oklahoma. He has published eight volumes of poetry, including his latest, Sunlight & Cedar (VACPoetry, 2020). Ken's poems have been featured on The Writer's Almanac, and his work has been awarded by The Western Writers of America, The National Western Heritage Museum, SCMLA and The Oklahoma Center for the Book. Information available at kenhada.org.

Dottie Joslyn is a writer and poet living in Southwest Missouri. She is a retired Certified Applied Poetry Facilitator in the field of Poetry Therapy, Certified Journal Facilitator, and Journal to the Self® Instructor. Her poems have appeared in: American Tanka, Buffalo Bones, Poetry from the Trail Ridge Writers, Wellness & Writing Connections Newsletter, Beginning Again: Creative Responses to Poetry of Presence, and Gyroscope Review. She also has a poetry book, Just Show Up, published in late 2018. Her website, www.joslynpoems.com has more information and includes an interactive blog.

Jennifer L. Knox's sixth book of poems, Crushing It, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Publisher's Weekly's review called Crushing It, “Darkly inventive…This is a careful, thoughtful book about the complexities of identity and the difficulty of words.” Knox's poems have been published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Granta, McSweeney’s,five times in the Best American Poetry series, and the 2022 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses anthology. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. She received an Iowa Arts Council Fellowship for her crowdsourced poetry project, Iowa Bird of Mouth. Over 750 people from around the world contributed to the project; the code is open source and free to use in noncommercial projects.