L&T staff report
Liberal native and published author Steve Brisendine will be provding a poetry reading from his published works at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 6 at the Leader & Times studio, 16 S. Kansas Ave. The event is free and open to the public.
Brisendine grew up in Liberal and graduated from Southwestern Heights in 1981. Brisendine worked as a reporter for the Southwest Daily Times in the 1990s before becoming a reporter for the Hutchinson News and then for the Associated Press.
Brisendine now lives in Mission and has published five collections of poetry. His works include:
• “The Words we Do Not Have” (2021, Spartan Press) — all poems based on foreign words for which there’s no one-word English equivalent;
• “Salt Holds No Secret but This” (2022, Spartan Press) — a more loosely themed collection (remembering the past, foretelling the future, secrets and mysteries);
• “To Dance with Cassiopeia and Die” (2022, Alien Buddha Press) — poems 10 lines or under, half under Brisendine’s name and half published earlier under his pen name of Stephen Clay Dearborn;
• “Full of Old Books and Silence” (2024, Alien Buddha Press) — more tiny poems (all six lines or fewer); and•
• “Behind the Wall Cloud of Sleep” (2024, Spartan Press) — all poems based on Brisendine’s dreams.
• “There’s a good deal of Kansas, especially Southwest Kansas, in my writing, and a bit of the Oklahoma Panhandle as well,” Brisendine said. “So the reading will be fairly heavy on that material. We never stop being from where we’re from, do we?”
Copies of Brisendine’s works will be available for purchase.
