Event Archive

Eighteen-sixty-nine was indeed a year of sweeping changes in Kansas City, Missouri. It introduced the arrival of perhaps the most influential of technological additions ever to be made to the area—the Hannibal Bridge. It also marked the year when Annie Chambers arrived, ready to begin a new career in the thriving town. Both signaled the beginning of a new age in the Midwestern cow town.

In Canada, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford introduces us to teenager Del Parsons, who after his parents’ imprisonment for bank robbery flees his Montana home, beginning a new life on the Saskatchewan prairie.

Ford reads from Canada and holds a conversation with UMKC Writer-in-Residence Whitney Terrell, organizer of the Writers at Work series. Ford is the author of the Bascombe novels, which include The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land.

Co-sponsored by the Writers at Work Roundtable and the UMKC English Department.

From Adelaide in Guys and Dolls to Nina in In the Heights and Elphaba in Wicked, female characters in Broadway musicals have belted and crooned their way into the American psyche. Author Stacy Wolf looks not just at female characters but at women performers and creators to chronicle the evolution of feminist thought in this singularly American theatrical form.

Wolf is a professor of theater and director of the Princeton Atelier at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is the author of A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical.

Director Pedro Almodovar has created a traditional “women’s picture” -- but with the sort of twists we expect from the "bad boy" of Spanish cinema. Marisa Paredes plays a writer of romantic best-sellers who finds her marriage falling apart and her career threatened.