passion for Chandra Dickson.
The walls of the Blank Page Gallery in Wichita’s Delano District have played host to an eclectic mix of artwork, including knitting created by a group called the Grim Knitters. At home among the offbeat items is a most distinctive person: Chandra Dickson, the gallery’s literary curator and a graduate teaching assistant at Wichita State, where she teaches public speaking.
The Blank Page’s mission is to encourage the area’s youth to be active in the arts, and Dickson ardently supports this cause. She has been involved with the gallery for several years, taking part in open mic poetry readings, among other Blank Page activities.
Another of Dickson’s pursuits is “getting poetry to the people,” as she says. She works to accomplish this by distributing a monthly poetry broadsheet around Wichita, posting it in grocery stores, cafés — even on bulletin boards in local businesses.
Poetry has always been a passion for Dickson. She is particularly partial to prose poetry. “I wrote my first poem when I was nine,” she says with a laugh. This first foray into poetry was about a dog.
She’s come a long way since her poem about a dog. Her poetry has been published in The Cimarron Review, Mikrokosmos, Thunder Sandwich and Lucid Moon.
