Kansas City is a metroplex of cities and bedroom communities clustered on the border between eastern Kansas and Western Missouri. Kansas City is home to many cultural, educational, sporting, and industrial entities. Kansas City jazz is emulated by musicians. The Kansas City International Airport is a travel hub.
    Once a rail head, Kansas City was known for its stock yards and good steak dinners. The stock yards have now closed, but fine steaks and Kansas City barbeque are still on tap.
    Robert Day was born in Shawnee, and uses the stockyards at the climax of his The Last Cattle Drive. Mystery writer Nancy Pickard lives and writes in Merriam, and her recent novel The Virgin of Small Plains is set in the Kansas Flint Hills. Maxine Clair was raised in an African-American neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas, also the home town of fiction writer Kellie Wells. Short story master Gerald Shapiro, who went to the University of Kansas and taught at University of Nebraska, was raised in Overland Park, the current home of young adult writer Richard Jennings.
    Brad Sneed, author/illustrator of children's books, lives in Prairie Village. Wyatt Townley and Roderick Townley live and work from Shawnee Mission.
   Casey Pycior was born and raised in Kansas City, "on the Kansas side--it matters," he says.