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.

Nicole Cooley

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup Nicole Cooley

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, and is the author of seven books of poems, including most recently Mother Water Ash, as well as Breach and Girl After Girl After Girl. Her first book, Resurrection, received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. She lives outside of NYC with her family and teaches in the MFA program in creative writing and literary translation at Queens College, City University of New York.

 

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

Mother Water Ash: Poems

Mother Water Ash, a wrenching new collection of poems by Nicole Cooley, explores the personal grief of a mother’s sudden death alongside the environmental crises of the storms, fires, and floods that now dominate our world. Examining the landscapes of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, these poems ponder what it means to mourn in the face of ecological catastrophe, and traipse the terrains left by loss.