Middle-America's most engaging authors since 1998.
Middle-America's most engaging authors since 1998.
Wagner served as Missouri poet laureate from 2021 to 2023. She is the author of several collections and was winner of the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. The Missouri Arts Council selected her as the Independent Artist of 2020. Wagner serves as president of The Writers Place (TWP) in Kansas City. currently coedits the literary journal I-70 Review, where she has been a staff member since 2010.
Published: 2025
Backstories might be called a short story collection in verse. These unforgettable poems pack the power of the best short fiction, and as a whole they tell the story of today’s American high school classrooms: the keen intelligence nestled in the most disadvantaged students, the circumstances that cause students to prefer detention so they might find a quiet place to do homework rather than the family motel room of 6 siblings. This is a book of courage.
—Trish Reeves