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Jennifer Polson Peterson

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2026 Jennifer Polson Peterson

Jennifer Polson Peterson serves as the 2024-28 Poet Laureate of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In 2025, she was named a Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Image, The Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at the University of Southern Mississippi.

 

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

Noon to 12:45 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe: Poems

Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe is a book about apocalypses large and small. The poems in this meditative debut collection explore economic and climatological trends toward dissolution, and how these forces seep into the domestic sphere. Whether exploring the constellations of family dynamics or observing natural and human disasters, Jennifer Polson Peterson reflects on “ the newly unmade world” that nonetheless urges us to continue rebuilding.