Hi, I’m Juan J. Morales, an assistant professor of English at Colorado College and a poet in Pueblo, Colorado, here for Poets on the Plains. Today, I’m excited to share with you a poem by fellow Pueblo poet, Mark Chartier, titled, “Kindergarten.”

Hello booklovers, Miriam Scott here from Amarillo, Texas. Today I get to share with you my thoughts on the wonderfully written and illustrated book The American Dream? by author and artist Shing Yin Khor. There are a few things she and I have in common. We are both naturalized immigrants, love traveling alone, and we are both fascinated with the American Dream and the many different shapes this Dream takes in such a vast country of great diversity.

In the decades after the Louisiana Purchase, the U.S.’s economic frontier expanded westward. In 1833 the military built a fort on the north bank of the Arkansas River, then the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. First called Fort William and later renamed to Bent’s Fort, after William and Charles Bent, two brothers from St. Louis who led a trade caravan to Santa Fe in 1829.

Hi, I’m Lauren Pronger from Amarillo, TX and I’m talking about The American Dream?, a graphic novel memoir by Shing Yin Khor for the HPPR Radio Readers. As an avid graphic novel reader, one of the things that struck me about this book is that the illustrations tend to float on the page removed from their contexts.