Mark Allen Everett News Today

McAlesters Poetry Club is bringing poetry to downtown McAlester with an event including featured poet Mary B. Gray and an open mic night for local poets.

The one-man show "More Sky — The Story of Lynn Riggs" will be presented April 28 at the University of Oklahoma Memorial Union.

When Rilla Askew first read one of Joy Harjo’s poems in 1989 as she sat in a motel in St. Louis, she was stunned by the power of her words.  “I just kind of fell back on the bed,” Askew said. “I was so knocked out by the power of it, by the beauty of it, by the pain, and by the honesty and by the things that I recognized that were so particularly Oklahoma and so particularly Native.”  Harjo’s poems, which were featured in “Oklahoma Indian Markings,”...