KC Latina poet catches Garrison Keillor’s attention

In the past few days, thousands of radio listeners have heard the poetry of Linda Rodriguez, vice president of the Latino Writers’ Collective in Kansas City, thanks to public radio star Garrison Keillor.

Earlier this month, Northwestern University Press sent a review copy of Rodriguez’s new book, Heart’s Migration, to The Writer’s Almanac, a nationally syndicated public radio segment of poetry and literary insight from the famous Prairie Home Companion host. To Rodriguez’s surprise, Keillor quickly selected two of her poems to read on the air. It’s no small honor: his program is heard on 466 radio stations around the country, in addition to thousands of e-mail and podcast subscribers.

“He’s sort of the Oprah of poetry,” Rodriguez says.

So how did Keillor do?

“He reads the first poem, ‘The Sun Grows in Your Smile,’ exactly the way I wrote it, sort of headlong, all-in-one-breath,” Rodriguez says. “The second poem, ‘Meditation on the Word Need,’ he read quite differently from the way I meant it. I wrote it with an ironic, tongue-in-cheek tone that twists into serious-against-its-will at the end. He reads it very straight and serious all the way through. To my surprise, it works that way.”

Listen to Keillor’s renditions of Rodriguez’s poems here and here.