The 2025 Louisiana Book Festival will be held on Saturday, November 1.
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Ed Ruzicka

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup Ed Ruzicka

Ed Ruzicka has published three full-length books of poetry. His poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Rattle, Canary, the Xavier Review, and the San Pedro River Review, as well as many other literary journals and anthologies. Ruzicka has been a finalist for the Dana Award and the New Millennium Award and is the president of the recently re-established Poetry Society of Louisiana. He lives with his wife Renee in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

 

Schedule

10:15 am to 11:15 am

State Library, Fifth Floor, Capitol View Room

Louisiana Poet Laureate Presents Louisiana Poets

with Nicole Cooley, Peter Cooley, J. Bruce Fuller, Dylan Krieger, Ed Ruzica, and host Alison Pelegrin

 

11:30 am to 12:15 pm

Cavalier House Books Tent

Book Signing

Squalls: Poems

Ed Ruzicka takes us through “days of tragedy and joy” illuminating jeweled moments under “a tender rain” when “Beads dangle at the tips off slender crepe myrtle branches.” Squalls navigates through the disasters of life on the Gulf Coast of storms and floods and more personal wreckage: “I had something I lost. I want / something others have. Tomorrow / is around one more hard corner.” Yet past the hard corners he looks above to find solace “under the mammoth / teat of a milky aurora...” So that when he gets back down to earth and its storms, a plain fact acquires a grace of humble redemption and humor: “I have this, one wheelbarrow full of rain.” This is a man rooted in his life who improbably writes poetry in love of his daughters, against his losses and upon his joys. I like being in Ed Ruzicka’s world. You will too. — Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and The Missing Jew