The 2025 Louisiana Book Festival will be held on Saturday, November 1.
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Mark Yakich

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup Mark Yakich

Mark Yakich is Gregory F. Curtin, S.J. Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, where he is Director of the Center for Editing & Publishing. He is the author of many poetry collections, including Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross, The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine, and Spiritual Exercises, all from Penguin Books. His unconventional guide to reading and writing poems, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide, is taught worldwide. His latest book, co-authored with Christopher Schaberg, is the micro-essay collection Little Data. 

 

Schedule

11:00 am to 11:45 am

State Capitol, Senate Committee Room C

Little Data

 

Noon to 12:45 pm

Cavalier House Books Tent

Book Signing

Little Data

This is a delightful book, one as quirkily insightful as it is entertaining. — Kirkus Reviews

Little Data turns like an Alfa Romeo racing Formula One. Here, says the title, take a nut of an idea then squeeze it until the juice comes out. Each bit of data here is extracted, transformed, crushed, then palpated back to life. Who knew so much love could be drawn from airports and backpacks, obstacle courses and salami? Schaberg and Yakich are excellent drivers and take the turns with mad skill — a high-speed Dickinson, an autobahn Basho, a freeway Rimbaud. — NICOLE WALKER, author of Processed Meats

In this glossary of contemporary terms and concepts, deftly and delightfully defamiliarized, the authors reveal an uncanny ability to zoom in on the details of modernity and consider them in such a way that the everyday becomes once again miraculous. — MATTHEW VOLLMER, author of All of Us Together in the End

Against certainty and smug quantification, Little Data resists the banal commodification of contemporary parenting manuals. By exploring the humility of being human, the sordid failures of our idealisms, and the insoluble paradox of choice, these mini-essays remind us that although test results and quizzes haven’t made people more legible to one another, children still can. — ALINA STEFANESCU, author of Every Mask I Tried On