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Emily Cosper

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2026 Emily Cosper

Emily Cosper lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she has made her home for more than 30 years.  Originally from the West, she remains drawn to its landscapes and hopes someday to divide her time between there and New Orleans. She recently retired after a long career as a professor of English and academic dean. Her work has appeared in Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature, The Paddock Review, and in her head.

 

Schedule

Will be posted when available.

Witness Before the Fall

Witness Before the Fall unfolds between the lush, sinking streets of New Orleans and the wide landscapes of the American West, between memory and place, and loss and beauty. In this debut collection, Emily Cosper explores aging, family history, and the passage of time through poems that bear witness to a father's slow decline, a beloved city both magical and troubled, and the ancestors and stories that shape our lives.

Rich with the sights, sounds, and contradictions of New Orleans, these poems move through grief, wonder, environmental change, and the enduring pull of home. Here, loss abounds even as gardens bloom, and creativity offers solace in the face of uncertainty. Witness Before the Fall is a meditation on aging, acceptance, and what we choose to hold close as everything else slips away.