Mona Lisa Saloy
Biography
Mona Lisa Saloy, PhD, author, folklorist, educator, and scholar of Creole culture in articles, documentaries, and poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina, is currently Conrad N. Hilton Endowed Professor of English at Dillard University and just completed her term as Louisiana Poet Laureate. Her first book, Red Beans & Ricely Yours, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Her second, Second Line Home, celebrates New Orleans Black Creole culture.
Schedule
11:30 am to 12:15 pm
State Library, Fifth Floor Serials
Poet Laureate to Poet Laureate
with Mona Lisa Saloy and Alison Pelegrin
12:45 pm to 1:45 pm
State Library, Fifth Floor, Capitol View Room
National Student Poets 2023 with Louisiana Poets Laureate
with Darrell Bourque, Jacqueline Flores, Miles Hardingwood, Shangri-La Hou, Kallan McKinney, Gabriella Miranda, Mona Lisa Saloy, and moderator Hannah Jones
2:00 pm to 2:45 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing
Black Creole Chronicles: Poems
Who are Black Creoles? Saloy's new poems address ancestral connections to contemporary life, traditions celebrated, New Orleans Black life today, Louisiana Black life today, enduring and surviving hurricanes, romance, #BlackLivesMatter, #wematter, as well as poems of the pandemic lockdown from New Orleans. Saloy's new collection of verse advances and updates narratives of Black life to now, including day-to-day Black speech, the lives of culture keepers, and family tales. These poems detail cultural and historical memory of enslavement not taught and offer healing and hope for tomorrow.
Reviews
"This is a poetry of the spirit, of the ancestors." — Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Tradition
"Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy beautifully captures the culture and essence of Louisiana in her mesmerizing poetry." — Gov. John Bel Edwards
"... a poet who opens the hidden wound in order to heal us." — Dr. Laura Mullen, William R. Kenan Jr. Chair in the Humanities at Wake Forest University
"[A] major collection of breath-taking poetry" — Cynthia Hogue, author of instead, it is dark
Volunteer
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