North Arkansas College is excited to host Dr. Agnes Vojta on March 2, 2026, in the college’s library on the south campus at 1515 Pioneer Drive. The event will begin at 11:30 A.M. The public is invited to attend and enjoy poetry, discussion, and refreshments.
Dr. Agnes Vojta grew up in a home filled with books and music. Her mother was an opera singer, and the family sang together a lot. Early on, she loved words and rhymes and enjoyed memorizing and reciting ballads. She says, “I read all the time and was writing my own poems and stories as soon as I could form the letters.”
While she loved to study literature or languages at her university, she had many interests, including math, and she eventually majored in physics. Writing, then, became “one of my many hobbies,” she says.
The Berlin Wall fell during her fourth year in college and opened a previously forbidden world. After graduate school, she moved to California for two years as a postdoc, then returned to Germany, had two children, and then accompanied her husband for a year in Oregon and a year in England. Then in 2001, Vojta and her family settled in Rolla, Missouri.
For approximately twelve years she stayed busy parenting, homeschooling, and teaching physics at Missouri S&T, but as her children started leaving for college, she found herself with more time and the question of what to do with this “new phase of my life,” she says. “I decided to become more intentional about writing. I started attending poetry readings, met other poets, read at open mics.”
“I love sharing poetry at readings,” she says. “I founded the Poetry at the Pub reading and open mic series in Rolla and am thrilled to see our local poetry community grow.”
She also started publishing. Her first collection, Porous Land, came out in 2019 when Vojta was fifty. She then published three more books, including The Eden of Perhaps, A Coracle for Dreams, and Love Song to Gravity, and has been involved in several collaborative projects with other artists, including a collection of Ozark nature poetry titled Wild Muse. She is also an associate editor of Thimble Literary Magazine
Many of her poems are inspired by nature and her observations while hiking, kayaking, or gardening. “It is always a surprise what I will find, and in which way nature weaves into my thoughts and feelings,” she says, “making me look closer and pay more attention to the world around me.”