Spoken Word

A weekly open mic event for Kansas City musicians and poets is boosting careers and fostering the live music scene at 18th and Vine.

The extent of white supremacist groups in Missouri, and a venue in the historic 18th and Vine district is giving artists a live audience for their music and poetry.

"I don't like sanitized spaces," says artist Harold Smith, whose house in Kansas City, Kansas, doubles as his studio.It's about a mile from where he grew…

Segment 1: A shuttered charter school in Kansas City leaves some families in the lurch.The closing of Kansas City's Benjamin Banneker Charter Academy…

Monique Gabrielle Salazar is a writer, artist and musician. A member of the Latino Writers Collective, she’s also a self-described “collector of…

Creative and commercial writer Lisa Stewart has traveled thousands of miles as a long-distance horseback rider, through the Rockies and the Midwest. In…

Spoken word artist and poet Jeanette Powers started writing at the age of 9. "I realized that in my imagination, I was completely free. There were no…

Sometimes it just takes one teacher to change everything. For Seann Weir, who studies English and creative writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas…

Glenn North describes spoken word poetry as "in your face," using word play and slang. And he's gained a reputation as a performance poet, sharing the…

Throughout the 1990s, Mark Hennessy was the frontman for the hard rock Lawrence band PAW. After the band broke up in 2000, Hennessy turned his focus to…

When Glenn North read a poem at the grand opening for the American Jazz Museum in 1997, something clicked. From that moment on, the poet and the museum…

Let’s play a word association game. What’s do you think when I say, “Kansas City?” Barbecue? The Royals? How about jazz? Now what about when I say “Jazz,”…