Artspeak Radio with Ortolani, Palmer, Stewart, and Trowbridge

Artspeak Radio, Wednesday, February 11, 2026, 9am -10am CST, 90.1fm KKFI Kansas City Community Radio, streaming live audio www.kkfi.org Producer/host Maria Vasquez Boyd welcomes poets Al Ortolani, Robert Stewart, & William Trowbridge. Four prize-winning Kansas City area poets—Al Ortolani, Robert Stewart & William Trowbridge—will read poems and discuss the art of poetry on Artspeak Radio, KKFI-Fm 90.1, at 9 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026.   Al Ortolani, a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize, has been featured in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and George Bilgere’s Poetry Town. He was a recent recipient of the Bill Hickok Humor Award from I-70 Review. His first young adult novel was published by Meadowlark Books in 2023. Currently, Ortolani is a contributing editor to the Chiron Review. Robert Stewart’s 4th book of essays, A Way of Happening, is due in spring 2026.  His latest of four books of poems, Higher, won the 2022 Prize Americana.  Outside Language: Essays (Helicon Nine Editions) was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Awards, and winner of the Thorpe Menn Award.  He won a National Magazine Award while editor of New Letters magazine.  See Substack https://robertstewart42.substack.com/ William Trowbridge’s 11th poetry collection, Maintenance, came out from Spartan Press in mid-November, 2025. Over 550 of his poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and in more than 50 anthologies and textbooks. He was Poet Laureate of Missouri from 2012 to 2016. For more information, see his website, wtrowbridge.net.