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.

Peter Cooley

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup Peter Cooley

Peter Cooley is emeritus professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University. He is the author of 12 books of poetry including The Van Gogh Notebook, Divine Margings, and Night Bus to the Afterlife. He is also the Poetry Editor of Christianity and Literature. A former Poet Laureate of Louisiana, Cooley lives In New Orleans.

 

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

Accounting for the Dark

A poet wrestles with faith and loss post-pandemic.

In these poems, Peter Cooley encounters both the political realities of loss through the pandemic in New Orleans and personal loss through the deaths of family members and friends. Death is a constant in this book of elegies, but the redemptive power of representation is persistent as this poet of faith memorializes imagined and lived experiences.