Maryfrances Wagner Wants You to Write a Haiku.

Ever since Missouri appointed Walter Bargen as the state’s first poet laureate, every appointee to this prestigious post has read at Unbound. We are happy to continue this tradition by welcoming Maryfrances Wagner to Columbia this April.

Not only will Maryfrances be reading from her work, she will also be giving two workshops on haiku for festival attendees. One of her missions during her tenure as poet laureate is to spearhead the Missouri Haiku Project, which aims to encourage everyone - yes, everyone - to write haiku and share them. Unbound is partnering with Maryfrances and the Missouri Haiku Project in a bid to get as many festival goers as possible to get involved. We’ll be announcing more details soon, but in the meantime, you can read more about the Missouri Haiku Project here.

Maryfrances Wagner’s newest books are The Silence of Red Glass, The Immigrants’ New Camera, and Solving for X.  Her newly reissued book Red Silk won the Thorpe Menn Book Award. She co-edits I-70 Review, serves on The Writers Place board, was 2020 Missouri Individual Artist of the Year, and is Missouri Poet Laureate 2021-2023. Her poems have appeared in New Letters, Midwest Quarterly, Laurel Review, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry East, Green Mountain Literary Review, Voices in Italian Americana, Main Street Rag, Rattle, Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, et. al. For more information, check her website:  http://maryfranceswagnerwriter.fieldinfoserv.com/