The 2025 Louisiana Book Festival will be held on Saturday, November 1.
This website has a .gov link

The .gov means it’s official.

Louisiana government websites often end in .gov. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a Louisiana government site.

HTTPS Connection

The site is secure.

The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Darrell Bourque

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup Darrell Bourque
© John Jarman Slaughter

© John Jarman Slaughter

Darrell Bourque is a former Louisiana poet laureate, the recipient of the 2014 Louisiana Writer Award, and the 2019 Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Humanist of the Year Award. Among his poetry collections are In Ordinary Light: New and Selected Poems and Megan’s Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie. His 2019 works, From the Other Side: Henriette Delille and migraré, are both sets of ekphrastic poems keyed to the paintings of Shreveport artist Bill Gingles.

 

Schedule

10:00 am to 10:45 am

State Capitol, Senate Committee Room C

A Conversation with David Kirby

with David Kirby and moderator Darrell Bourque

 

11:30 am to 12:15 pm

State Library, Fifth Floor, Capitol View Room

Poets of Narrative 4

with Felice Belle, Darrell Bourque, and moderator Sheryl St. Germain

 

12:30 pm to 1:15 pm

Cavalier House Books Tent

Book Signing

 

1:45 pm to 2:45 pm

State Library, Fifth Floor, Capitol View Room

Narrative 4 and the National Student Poets

with Felice Belle, Marcus Burns, Darrell Bourque, Robert Gao, Sofia Kamal, Anya Melchinger, Nadia Wright, and moderators Hannah Jones and Dennis Nangle

(ages 14 and up)

Until We Talk

This collection is a set of jazz-inflected ghazals tied to epigraphs from Colum McCann’s award-winning novel Apeirogon and illuminated with Bill Gingles’ abstract expressionist paintings.

Until We Talk is of race, ethnicity, human rights, social justice, hate crime, terror, supremacy, colonialism/post-colonialism/neo-colonialism, the Other. Predominately rooted in the tragic losses in contemporary Israeli and Palestinian families, the poems braid those losses into parallel losses in geo-political race, ethnic, class, and caste conflicts.