Artspeak Radio, Wednesday, January 21, 2026, 9am -10am CST, 90.1fm KKFI Kansas City Community Radio, streaming live audio www.kkfi.org

Producer/host Maria Vasquez Boyd welcomes poet, editor, essayist Huascar Medina.

Huascar Medina was born in Killeen, Texas and has lived artfully in Kansas for over two decades.

As a second-generation immigrant living in the Heartland, Huascar considers himself a New American exploring the boundaries between identity and location, focusing on cultural empathy, social cohesion, class structures, first-generation trauma, mental health, and internalized diasporic longing and belonging.

Huascar Medina served as the Poet Laureate of Kansas from 2019 to 2022 and became an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow in 2022. Medina has authored three books of poetry; Protest As Love Poem (Meadowlark Press, 2026) Un Mango Grows in Kansas (Spartan Press, 2020) and How to Hang the Moon (Spartan Press, 20019).

Medina’s forthcoming collection of essays, The Prairie Fook (Plainspoken Press, 2027), is a lyrical meditation on politics, class, and culture.

Medina is the literary editor for seveneightfive magazine, a staff editor at South Broadway Press in Denver, Colorado, and a contributing op-ed writer at Kansas Reflector . His work has appeared in The Flint Hills Review, Gasconade Review, Green Mountains Review, Inscape, Kansas Magazine, Latino Book Review, The New York Times, and other publications.

www.huascarmedina.com

Read his poems and profile at poets.org