Kansas Poet Laureate, 2007-2009

Denise Low, a fifth-generation Kansan, will assume the post of Kansas poet laureate on July 1. Low is a poet, writer, and college professor at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence. She grew up in Emporia, Kansas, and says "the freedom and wide-open spaces of her childhood defined her sensibilities and her verses."

Low's plan for her two-year term includes e-mailing a poem by a Kansas poet each week to libraries, schools and subscribers as well as have it published at kansaspoets.com, as state poetry site created by Jonathan Holden (our present poet laureate), and to create an Internet and print anthology of Kansas poets.

"Poetry holds our communities together and sustains or spirits," she writes in her blog, deniselow.blogspot.com. "It celebrates the land, and our loves, and it mourns our losses. Words create our ability to survive."

Source: Star Magazine, February 4, 2007