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John Warner Smith served as Louisiana Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021, the only African American male to hold the role in its 84-year history. The author of five poetry collections—including Our Shut Eyes, with a sixth arriving in 2027—he also wrote the novella For All Those Men and the novel Sisters of Gavinville. A Cave Canem Fellow and Academy of American Poets Fellow, Smith won the 2019 Linda Hodge Bromberg Literary Award. He is an adjunct English instructor at Southern University in Baton Rouge.

 


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Murders at Mer Rouge

In 1922 Louisiana, at the height of the Ku Klux Klan's power, two white men who dared to speak against the Klan vanished from the small plantation town of Mer Rouge. Four months later, their mutilated bodies emerged-igniting outrage that reached the governor's desk and shook the nation.

The Murders at Mer Rouge unravels the explosive true story behind those disappearances: a network of Klan intimidation, political corruption, and a cover-up designed to protect violent men in power. As state and federal investigators close in, one woman becomes a pivotal-and dangerous-piece of the puzzle: Lollie Belle Olive, a young mixed-race prostitute entangled with both a Klan leader and one of the murdered men. Her secrets threaten to expose everything.

Riveting and meticulously researched, this novella reveals the investigation that helped fracture the Klan's stronghold in north Louisiana-and accelerated its decline across the country.