The 2025 Louisiana Book Festival will be held on Saturday, November 1.
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Carolyn Hembree

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup Carolyn Hembree

Carolyn Hembree's third poetry collection, For Today, was published by LSU Press. She has been awarded the Trio Award, the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award, an ATLAS grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents, and grants and fellowships from PEN, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Southern Arts Federation. She is a professor in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans and serves as the poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.

 

  

Schedule

12:30 pm to 1:30 pm

State Library, Fifth Floor, Capitol View Room

Louisiana Poet Laureate Presents Louisiana Poets, Part 2

with Jack B. Bedell, Catharine Savage Brosman, Ariel Francisco, Barbara Hamby, Carolyn Hembree, Andy Young, and host Alison Pelegrin

 

1:45 pm to 2:30 pm

Cavalier House Books Tent

Book Signing

For Today: Poems

A revelatory collection of poems set in the Gulf South, Carolyn Hembree’s For Today chronicles the experience of a woman who becomes a mother shortly after her father’s death and struggles to raise her child amid private and public turmoil. Written in closed and nonce forms that give way to the field composition of the maximalist title poem, the work explores grief, rage, and love in a community vulnerable to Anthropocene climate disasters. Through relationships with her daughter, neighbors, friends, ancestors, other poets (living and dead), and the earth, the speaker is freed to accept and celebrate her own perishability.