Caroline Kennedy to discuss poetry’s power Tuesday in KC

Caroline Kennedy, who will be at Unity Temple on the Plaza to discuss her new book, “Poems to Learn by Heart,” has known poetry for its potent and persuasive effects on family and country. Now she sees its power to change the lives of students in the New York City public schools.

An appreciation: Chinua Achebe, the voice of modern Africa

There are many legacies to Chinua Achebe’s remarkable career — as a novelist, as an activist, as a teacher, as a critic — but most important, he offered permission to half a century of writers, Africans and others, declaring forcefully and without apology that literature can encompass any and all stories.

Author Hugh Howey gets richer by giving away his work

Hugh Howey, author of the post-apocalyptic series “Wool,” self-published and gave away his work digitally before a big publisher put him in print. He doesn’t see piracy as the sales-killing threat that many in the entertainment industry do: To him, it’s another form of promotion.

‘The Book of My Lives’ told in gleaming prose

Aleksandar Hemon’s book of essays captures the variegated and diffuse lives of a writer whose life has been burnished by war, death and constant flux. Hemon’s stunning ability to merge the personal and the political, the existential with the banal is one of his most remarkable traits, and this collection is a compelling argument for his emergence as a vitally important writer.

‘Tiger Rag’ catches the rhythms of jazz

Novelist Nicholas Christopher uses that quintessentially American story to lay out an almost exhaustive version of the jazz lifestyle: how good musicians lived, and the bad ones, too; how they dressed when they were successful and when they were not; the kinds of food they ate 100 years ago and what constitutes luxury to them now; and their distinctive marks of poverty.

Author readings honor late poet Thomas Zvi Wilson

The reading series, on the third Tuesday of each month at Johnson County Central Resource Library, has included poets and prose writers from across the area and the country. This Tuesday, Phong Nguyen and Kathryn Nuernberger will read.

A double dose of Heat-Moon on ‘Blue Highways’ anniversary

“Blue Highways: A Journey Into America,” William Least Heat-Moon’s best-selling 1983 book about wandering and desire, has been reissued in paperback. Accompanying that is a new hardbound collection of articles and essays published over the years, “Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road.”