Previous Special Events

Join Kansas City writer Rhiannon Ross for an afternoon of Vietnamese poetry, performance art, live and recorded music, video, fashion, dance, and visual art, featuring Vi Tran, performance artist and musician, and Phong Nguyen, poet and assistant professor of English at the University of Central Missouri. Following the presentations, sample a variety of Vietnamese cuisine. The program and post-event reception is presented by the Vox Narro project that pairs writers with immigrant communities to give voice to the voiceless.

The Library kicks off this year’s summer film series of comedies starring Kansas City native Paul Rudd with this tale of energy drink salesmen (Rudd, Seann William Scott) who must perform community service as mentors to two young boys after a road rage incident. This title is recommended for adult audiences only.

Films are screened outside on the Rooftop Terrace. Filmgoers are welcome to bring blankets and folding chairs. In cases of inclement weather, screenings will be moved indoors to Helzberg Auditorium.

Celebrate the winners of the Children’s Book Week Bookmark Contest with a performance by drummer Brandon Draper.

Draper teaches percussion instruments at the University of Kansas and UMKC. He is also percussion director at Shawnee Mission West High School and music director at Kansas City Academy.

The program is appropriate for all ages.

Poetry duo Ezhno Martin and Jeanette Powers headline an evening of al fresco art and musical entertainment on the Central Library’s Rooftop Terrace as part of rises Zora, a multi-venue visual and performance arts project.

The Library event includes experimental acts by Kansas City-based composers, musicians, and sound artists.

rises Zora is sponsored by the Charlotte Street Foundation and organized by its curator-in-residence, Jamilee Polson Lacy.

Library Director Crosby Kemper III conducts a public conversation with Roshann Parris, president and CEO of the award-winning public relations firm Parris Communications Inc.

From Anne Hutchinson, whose doctrinal disputes with the Puritan clergy led to her expulsion from colonial Massachusetts, to Rosa Parks, who became a Civil Rights icon by refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, women have helped shape the American experience.

Performance rights to Dreamgirls, previously scheduled as the final Script-in-Hand show of the season, have been withdrawn by the publisher.

The seventh season of the Library’s Script-in-Hand performances concludes with a special Mother’s Day performance of the musical I Do! I Do! presented by the Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre.

Children and parents are invited to be part of monthly interactive story times presented by the Coterie Theatre. Coterie Theatre artists read from favorite children's books while audience members enjoy an opportunity to "jump into the story" and then participate in an improvised story of their own making.

Over nearly two decades Lady Bird Johnson recorded 47 oral history interviews with historian Michael Gillette and his colleagues at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. Now Gillette details Johnson’s stories of marriage to a powerful man, of creating a media empire, and of encounters with first ladies like Edith Bolling Wilson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Bess Truman.

The six-week America’s Music program is a film and discussion series that looks at popular music from blues to bluegrass, Broadway to rock ‘n’ roll. Each event features films followed by a discussion (and frequently performances) led by UMKC musicologist Andrew Granade.

Featured are the documentaries Latin Music USA: Bridges (2009) and From Mambo to Hip Hop: A South Bronx Tale (2006), and a discussion/perfromance with KC rapper Denzel "D/Will" Williams.