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Gina Ferrara

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2026 Gina Ferrara

Gina Ferrara is the author of six poetry collections including her latest, The Rooted and Recurrent.  Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Callaloo, The Poetry Ireland Review, Tar River, and The Southern Review. In 2025, she was appointed Poet Laureate of Louisiana. Since 2007, she has curated The Poetry Buffet, a monthly reading series in New Orleans. She teaches at Delgado Community College and lives near Bayou St. John with her husband, Jonathan Kline, and their bulldog.

 

Schedule

10:45 am to 11:45 am
Outside Museum, West Tent
The Louisiana Poet Laureate Presents Louisiana Poets, Vol I
Taylor Clement, do not destroy this: Poems
Rodney Jones, The Body and the End of Time: Poems Selected & New, 1985-2025
Justin Lacour, A Reading from the Book of Panic
Jonathan Penton, A Limited Number of Miracles: A Walk Through the New Orleans Sculpture Garden
Jennifer Polson Peterson, Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe: Poems
with Gina Ferrara

12:45 pm to 1:45 pm
Outside Museum, West Tent
Louisiana Poet Laureate Presents Louisiana Poets, Vol II
Emily Cosper, Witness Before the Fall
Bill Lavender, city of god
Biljana D. Obradović, Called by Distances: Poems
Ann Plicque, New Barrier Islands: Poems
Ed Ruzicka, The Invention of Dreaming: Poems
with Gina Ferrara

2:00 pm to 2:45 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

The Rooted and Recurrent: Poems

Set in a precarious landscape--lush, tropical but geographically vulnerable to threats of natural disaster--The Rooted and Recurrent reflectively and often lyrically explores the self, family history, and existing and encroaching challenges where the personal and political are fused together. Written during a formidable time when the country experienced political upheaval, a horrific pandemic, and individual isolation, the poems are rooted in an acute sense of place, complete with live oaks, sweet olive, and satsumas that not only tell us where and when, but more importantly forge an identity by recounting memories that are powerful and generative. The poems in the collection have recurrent themes of family, loss, and change, both personal and environmental. Ultimately, they aim to make personal connections and invite the reader to become emotionally tethered.