Former Louisiana Poet Laureate John Warner Smith has published five collections of poetry, most recently Our Shut Eyes. A sixth collection, From the Flinty Rock: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming. In 2022, Smith published his first novella, For All Those Men. His memoir I, Too, Am Tar Baby, was published in 2025. His second novella, Murders on Red Hill, will be published in 2026. A Cave Canem Fellow, Smith is a 2020 Poet Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets and is winner of the 2019 Linda Hodge Bromberg Literary Award. 

Schedule

11:15 am to Noon
Outside Museum, West Tent
Hurricanes Katrina & Rita at 20: An Anthology of Louisiana Poetry with Art
Featuring contributors Malaika Favorite, J. Bruce Fuller, Merrill Guillory, Patrice Melnick, Benjamin Morris, Michelle (M.A.) Nicholson, Valentine Pierce, Karisma Price, and Brad Richard, with editors Mona Lisa Saloy and John Warner Smith

12:15 pm to 1:00 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

2:15 pm to 3:00 pm
Outside Museum, South Tent
Stories Told and Untold: Sisters, Secrets, and Southern Reckoning
Kelly Mustian, The River Knows Your Name: A Novel
John Warner Smith, Sisters of Gavinville
with moderator Megan Holt

3:15 pm to 4:00 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

Hurricanes Katrina & Rita at 20: An Anthology of Louisiana Poetry with Art

The year 2025 marks the 20^th anniversary of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Two esteemed, award-winning former Poet Laureates of Louisiana, one a native of New Orleans, Mona Lisa Saloy, and the other a native of Lake Charles, John Warner Smith, worked together to commemorate those historic events by creating a forum for published and emerging poets as well as nine artists of Louisiana to share art and poems of their experiences, feelings, and reflections of Katrina and Rita as seen through their eyes and the lives that the disasters impacted.

"Hurricanes, Katrina and Rita at 20 is jazz funeral second line through and through. The poems rise like white handkerchiefs of hope waving over the heads and hearts of witnesses who know grief and loss and terror and how to dance the dance of passing through. Kudos to Saloy and Smith for bringing us these songs of rupture and repair."--Darrell Bourque, Louisiana Poet Laureate, 2007-2011

"If you’ve lived through them, storms like Katrina and Rita draw a hard line in your history, like BC and AD, between the before and the after times. For some, the in-between time before life regains normalcy takes hours, for some whole decades, and each moment on that hard line has countless voices. Those voices are exactly what Hurricanes Katrina and Rita at 20 brings to light. Curated by two of the most accomplished poets Louisiana has produced, Poet Laureates Mona Lisa Saloy and John Warner Smith, and filled with some of the Gulf South’s finest voices, this anthology takes us from the levees to the backwaters, into cities and beyond, chronicling pain and loss and spirit and hope through all the voices that helped us push through that hard line into our future."--Jack B. Bedell, author of Ghost Forest, Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019

Sisters of Gavinville

Through the saga of the journey of Jesse and Ella Hayes and their seven daughters, an African American family living in a small fisheries town in Southeast Louisiana, Sisters of Gavinville chronicles the civil rights struggles of all African Americans in the second half of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st.

Aside from their rise from poverty to wealth and political power, and their gifted intellect and uncommonly strong will, what is most unusual about "the Aunties," as the sisters eventually become known to the people of Gavinville, is their longevity. With the exception of one of them, who tragically dies at a young age, all of the sisters live at least 99 years. In the end, a dark family secret and personal resentments that have been harbored and hidden for decades threaten the family honor and legacy.

Sisters of Gavinville casts an entertaining yet illuminating and deeply thought-provoking light on the experiences of race, womanhood, human vulnerability, and spiritual reconciliation.