Married couple Reginald Gibbons, author of Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems And Stories, and Cornelia Maude Spelman, author of Missing: A Memoir, present their poetry and prose. Gibbons has published nine books of poems, a novel, and translations from Spanish and ancient Greek. He is a professor of English, Classics, Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. In Missing, Spelman reconstructs her mother’s life and untimely death, with the pacing of the mystery novels that her mother loved, and using everything from letters and interviews to the family’s quotidian paper trail—medical records, telegrams, and other oft-overlooked clues to a family’s history.

Recorded Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at the Cliff Dwellers Club.