In Conversation: Traci Brimhall & Marianne Kunkel

Frederico Garcia Lorca said “a poet must be a professor of the five senses and must open doors among them.” And what better to way to be a teacher of the senses than by looking at food as a source of inspiration? Marianne and Traci have both baked lines full of flavor and memory into their poems and plan to talk about how food and poems can both influence and have symbiotic overlap. From meals that are portals to personal history, to the ingredients both food and poems need to make something memorable, Traci and Marianne will discuss when they started connecting the two creative processes—cooking and writing—and how it has shaped their work. They will also talk about issues around food insecurity and in what ways art can directly address social issues like food access.

Traci Brimhall is a professor of creative writing at Kansas State University. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon, 2024). Her poems have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Nation, Orion, The New Republic, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, the National Park Service, the Academy of American Poets, and Purdue Library’s Special Collections to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart. She’s the currently the poet-in-residence at the Guggenheim museum and poet laureate for the State of Kansas.

Marianne Kunkel is the author of Hillary, Made Up (Stephen F. Austin State University Press) and The Laughing Game (Finishing Line Press), two anthologies, and many poems, including one in Best American Poetry 2025. She is an associate professor of English at Johnson County Community College and co-editor of Kansas City Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she was managing editor of Prairie Schooner and the African Poetry Book Fund.