Words and Music 2024
Wednesday-Saturday
November 20-23, 2023
Ralph Adamo teaches at Xavier University, where he edits Xavier Review and Xavier Review Press. His most recent books are All Fall Down (Lavender Ink 2024) and All the Good Hiding Places (Black Widow Press 2020).
Kayla Min Andrews is an MFA candidate in fiction at Randolph, where she has studied with Julia Phillips, Jean Chen Ho, and Clare Beams. She has been published in Lit Hub, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere, and was nominated for a Best of the Net 2020. She assisted Putnam with the posthumous publication of her mother’s novel—The Fetishist, by Katherine Min (Jan2024)—including editing the manuscript and writing the afterword. Kayla promoted The Fetishist in a multi-city book tour, with conversation partners including Susan Choi and Cathy Park Hong, and by speaking on podcasts such as Poured Over with Miwa Messer. The Fetishist and Kayla's work on it were profiled in The Washington Post and The LA Times. Kayla lives in New Orleans and is working on a novel.
Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter & co-editor of Fiolet & Wing. Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest, her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Pleiades, & several other anthologies & journals. Stacey holds a PhD from University of Mississippi, Oxford and an MFA from Fresno State. She lives and writes in New Orleans.
Ann Benoit has had TOO many lives. She is a classically trained singer, was a ballet dancer with a Regional company, a lawyer, a researcher for the judiciary and various local authors, an Assistant Attorney General, section chief for Antitrust and Business Litigation, Executive Director of a Community Care Center, a section chief for The Pro Bono Project, author, photographer, and book packager of 3 traditionally published cookbooks and photographer of 2 more, a columnist for the Times Picayune, a contract photographer, a memoir writer for hire, the Publisher of 14 online newspapers, and with the publication of Saudades, she now finds herself to be . . . a poet who love srun-on sentences. Who knew?
Gus Berg is a queer writer from Northern Minnesota or San Francisco, depending on who you ask, and he is currently pursuing his MFA with the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. His nonfiction, poetry, and short stories have been featured in publications like Zyzzyva, Circles, BuzzFeed, and Writing for a Real World.
Ariadne Blayde is a playwright and fiction writer based in New Orleans. Her debut novel, Ash Tuesday, was published in 2022 by indie press April Gloaming and is quickly becoming a local cult classic in-the-making. Her play The Other Room, which won the VSA Playwright Discovery Award, is produced around the world, and her satirical short story “Minor Difficulties in BigEasyWorld" won the 2023 Tennessee Williams Saints and Sinners Fiction Contest. Her other work has placed in international competitions including the Quantum Shorts Contest, the Patty Friedman Writing Competition, Lark Playwright’s Week, and more. Ariadne is currently at work on a short story collection exploring New Orleans’ past, present, and future through its three-century tug-of-war with the water around it and the existential threat of climate change in the next one. When she’s not writing, Ariadne can be found moonlighting as a ghost tour guide in the French Quarter.
Eve Brouwer, MLA, U of Chicago—has been writing all her life, from Chia Pet ads in the ‘80s to chapters in the (UCL, London) book, The Mad Cow Crisis, in 1998. But she found her true literary voice upon moving from Chicago to Louisiana in 2008. Since then, she’s been a finalist in the New Orleans Faulkner competition, was named the St. Tammany Parish Literary Artist of the Year, was a speaker at the Louisiana Book Fair, won first prize in the WNBA Poetry Contest, has been published in various anthologies, and wrote the novel, My Grandmother Danced.
Laura Brown has lived up and down Louisiana but called New Orleans home for more than a decade. Her favorite dish is crawfish étouffée, her favorite cocktail is the French 75, and her favorite activity is reading fiction (or writing it, depending on the day). The pandemic was the inciting event in her journey of writing publicly. Since 2021, her work has appeared in journals including Hemingway Shorts, Welter, Barely South Review, The Good Life Review, and forthcoming in the New Orleans Public Library’s RENEWED Anthology. Laura aspires to one day publish a novel (and advises that she has several manuscripts in the can—in case you know anybody).
Jacob Budenz is a queer author, multidisciplinary performance artist, and musician with an MFA from University of New Orleans and a BA from Johns Hopkins. The author of magic realist short story collection Tea Leaves (Amble Press 2023) and poetry chapbook Pastel Witcheries (Seven Kitchens Press 2018), Jake has fiction and poetry in Wussy Mag, Taco Bell Quarterly, Slipstream, and more as well as anthologies by Mason Jar Press and Unbound Edition, among others.
By day, Danny Cherry Jr. is an MBA-havin', caffeine-addicted corporate drone. But at night, he is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and a sometimes-journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Antigravity Magazine, and has written for: Buzzfeed News, Politico, and The Daily Beast; and published fiction for Apex Magazine, Fiyah Lit Mag, amongst others. His work has been acknowledged in Locus Magazine recommended reading list for 2022, as well as the Best American Sci-fi and Fantasy 2023 notable stories list. His recently released debut novel, The Pike Boys, is ahistorical crime drama based in 1920s NOLA, and can be purchased wherever you buy books. Follow him on social media on Twitter (X), TikTok, Instagram, and BlueSky @ DeeCherryWriter, where he posts pictures of his Teacup Poodle, Teddy!
Adam Clay's most recent book is Circle Back (Milkweed Editions, 2024). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, Bennington Review, Georgia Review, Boston Review, jubilat, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He received a Literary Arts Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission in 2018. For twenty years, he co-edited Typo Magazine, a journal of poetry and poetics. He directs the Creative Writing program at Louisiana State University.
Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her most recent book is the collection of poetry Mother Water Ash (Louisiana University Press, July 2024) as well as the two poetry collections, Girl after Girl after Girl (Louisiana State University Press, 2017) and Of Marriage (Alice James Books, 2018). She has published four other collections of poems, Breach, Milk Dress, The Afflicted Girls and Resurrection, as well as a novel, Judy Garland, Ginger Love, two chapbooks, Frozen Charlottes, A Sequence, and Vanishing Point, and a collaborative artists’ book (with book artist Maureen Cummins), Salem Lessons. Her awards include The Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Discovery/The Nation Award, an NEA, a Creative Artists fellowship from The American Antiquarian Society, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. Currently, she is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation and the English Department at Queens College-City University of New York.
Peter Cooley is Professor Emeritus and Director of Creative Writing, Tulane University 1975-2018. Author of twelve books of poetry.
Dalton: I’m 17 years old, and I am a Christian. I am one of 10 siblings, and I have a big family. I’ve made big mistakes in my life, but I decided to change my life and become a better person. I wrote my poem to show people that home is more than just a house or building. Home is what you make it, and when my grandpa passed away, I felt like his house was empty and not alive the way it used to be. When I learned about this poem contest, I figured that I could write about my pain and a part of my life. My Paw Paw was always there when I was a kid, and I wasn’t there when he passed away. I never got to tell him goodbye, so I figured I could honor a part of him through this poem.
DeuceThePoet is an accomplished Spoken word artist, song writer, pianist, Emcee, and a half of the DrumBo production. As a native of New Orleans, DeuceThePoe thas represented his city in national slam competitions such as HBO's Brave New Voices and Southern Fried Poetry Slam competition as a member of New Orleans Youth Slam team and the New Orleans Slam. Deuce has hosted many long lasting events in the City of New Orleans such as, "Speak Sunday's", “Neutral Grounds Open mic”, and the "Underground Mocha Room". Recently he has been producing tracks for artists and short films as well as mentoring young performing artists the same way some of the more seasoned artists helped mentor and inspire him and his work.
After having a 5 ½ year global odyssey of life-altering experiences through 32 countries, and collecting a wealth of stories, Carroll Devine returned to the US, taught school and raised vegetables, goats and kids in rural Missouri. Back in her native New Orleans area, besides teaching adult ESL classes, she’s been a journalist-a regular contributor to the Times-Picayune and various magazines. She was a poetry finalist in the William Faulkner writing competition and the 2023 Literary Artist of the Year in St. Tammany Parish. She is the author of the memoir, Sleeping Between the Rails and currently has two more works in progress.
Alison Fensterstock is a former music critic for the Times-Picayune and Gambit weekly and a current columnist at 64 Parishes. She's the editor of NPR Music's How Women Made Music (2024) and is currently working on a biography of cartoonist and music writer Bunny Matthews.
Affectionately known among their peers as Fox and Rob, Sibil Fox and Robert Richardson are a couple who endured twenty-one years as an incarcerated family. In 1997, Rob Rich, a first offender in Louisiana, was sentenced to 61-years as a result of overzealous prosecution. Not to be denied, after her release from prison in 2002, Fox Rich led a valiant charge to regain her husband’s freedom. In June 2018 Governor John Bel Edwards granted clemency to Rob. Ninety days later he was released. Their story is told in the acclaimed, award-winning documentary Time. They have also written a book together about their experience. Together they have six sons and continue their advocacy for incarcerated families through the NOLA chapter of Participatory Defense Movement ,an initiative of Rich Family Ministries, founded with the vision of “changing lives and laws through love” and dedicated to empowering families and marriages to thrive.
www.FreeQuencySpeaks.com | Storyteller, organizer, host, workshop leader, chaos collagist, youth worker & performance artist, FreeQuency is a gender-renegade Kenyan e/immigrant who is masculine off center, femme adjacent, an AunTea and/or a prettyboi. FreeQuency’s anti-disciplinary work interrogates and occupies the in between while exploring the nuances and stark contradictions of existence under racialized capitalism. This humanoid is the 2018 Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, the founder of Paza Sauti: Kenya & has been featured in or written for numerous outlets. Their work has amassed over 2 million views online including a TED talk that almost didn't get released.
Kelli Gann is a member of the Louisiana Books 2 Prisoners collective. Louisiana Books 2 Prisoners is a 100% volunteer-run 501c3 nonprofit dedicated to encouraging literacy and supporting incarcerated people in the Deep South by providing access to books and print resources. Our goals are to make prison life more endurable and facilitate a connection between people locked up on the inside and free people on the outside. LAB2P has been run by a volunteer collective since 2003. Following Hurricane Katrina in 2006, our group was restarted with nothing more than a few salvaged bookshelves in the hallway of a local cooperative space. With the support of our community and the dedication of local volunteers, our library has grown to include thousands of donated books, allowing us to mail out thousands of packages a year to people inside.
Kelly Harris-DeBerry is an award-winning poet and the author of Freedom Knows My Name and the chapbook, Home Girl. Her poems have been published in various publications, including Yale University's Caduceus Journal, Southern Voices, and more. In 2022, one of her poems was translated and displayed in Germany. She is known not only for her poetry but also for the ways she experiments with sound, music, and delivery to bend language. Kelly is always trying something new on the page or on the mic.
Kelly, a nationally respected arts consultant, supports various festivals, conferences, and organizations. Kelly has worked for Poets & Writers Inc. and served as a guest poetry editor for Bayou Magazine. Kelly was selected to the first cohort of the Random House Pathways to Publishing Fellowship program. Currently, she is completing her tenure on the national literary committee for a project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Smithsonian.
Her poem, The Water Next Time, appears in the 64 Parishes Magazine Fall 2024 Issue. She was a lead writer for Portraits of Us: A Book of Essays Centering Black Women Leading Philanthropy, a book on black women in philanthropy, in which she authored chapters on Ohio and New Orleans. Not only a writer, but her expertise in non-profit work and philanthropy makes her a writer in publishing and professional spaces. Her years of research on the Southern University Black Poetry Festival in the 1970s will be published in 2025. Kelly is the recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and Cave Canem and earned degrees from Kent State University and Lesley University’s MFA Program. In 2018, Kelly wrote the grant and curated the first Black Writers programming track for the Words and Music Festival called Black Joy & Justice to create more opportunities for writers of color in the festival.
Ahja Hawkins is a 16-year-old living in Gretna, Louisiana. She attends the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and is currently in her third year of high school. She’s the regional winner of Poetry Out Loud, has won a silver key in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, won third place in the Pinkie Gordon Lane Poetry Competition, and is published in Under the Madness magazine.
Carolyn Hembree's third poetry collection, For Today, was published by LSU Press. She has been awarded the Trio Award, the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award, an ATLAS grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents, and grants and fellowships from PEN, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Southern Arts Federation. She is a professor in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans and serves as the poetry editor of Bayou Magazine. www.carolynhembree.com
Jessica Kinnison's work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Phoebe, and The Southern Humanities Review, among other publications. She holds an MFA from Chatham University in Pittsburgh wheres he taught creative writing in the Allegheny County Jail as part of the Words Without Walls program. A 2018 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow, she has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was listed among “Eight New Orleans Poets to Watch” in Poets & Writers in April 2020. A Mississippi native, she is co-founder of the New Orleans Writers Workshop. She’s currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript entitled Ways to Die in Mississippi.
Christine Kwon is the author of A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue, which won the Cowles Poetry Book Prize (Black Lawrence Press 2023). She lives in New Orleans with her family.
Nick Lavender is a sixteen-year-old writer born and raised in New Orleans, currently attending the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA). There, he studies creative writing as a Level III junior. He's terribly fond of authors such as Anne Rice, Stephen King, and Oscar Wilde, and credits lots of his personal style to their books. He's also fond of run-on sentences, em dashes, parentheses, and the second person. Nick lives with his mother and father as well as a younger sibling. He has two dogs, two cats, and a bad habit of waiting until the last minute to get things done. He feels specially honored to be chosen for this prestigious award.
Annell López is the winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize and the author of the short story collection I'll Give You a Reason (Feminist Press). A Peter Taylor Fellow, her work has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Common, Brooklyn Rail, Refinery29 and elsewhere. López received her MFA from the University of New Orleans. She is working on a novel.
Dave “Mac” Marquis is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Nevada-Reno. He joined the department after earning his PhD from the College of William & Mary. Mac was the Book Review Editor for H-Labor and an Executive Assistant for the Labor and Working Class History Association. His work has primarily been focused on the timber industry of the South during Jim Crow and lies at the intersection of Labor, Environmental, and African American History. He is the co-editor of Books Through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement (University of Georgia Press). He also has a graphic history in progress, Timber Rattler: A Graphic History of The Brotherhood of Timber Workers, 1910-1916 (The Historic New Orleans Collection) which details the history and legacy of one of the largest interracial unions in the Deep South during Jim Crow.
C. Liegh McInnis is a poet, short story writer, Prince scholar, retired English instructor/co-founder of the Jackson State Creative Writing Program, former editor/publisher of Black Magnolias Literary Journal, and author of eight books—four collections of poetry, one collection of short fiction (Scripts: Sketches and Tales of Urban Mississippi), one work of literary criticism (The Lyrics of Prince: A Literary Look), one co-authored work, Brother Hollis: The Sankofa of a Movement Man, which discusses the life of Mississippi Civil Rights icon, and former First Runner-Up of the Amiri Baraka/Sonia Sanchez Poetry Award. Additionally, he has been published in periodicals and anthologies.
Amanda T. McIntyre is a Trinidadian writer, artist, and scholar. She is the 2025 Tilting Axis Fellow for her project Present Continuous that applies digital intervention towards archiving the materiality and intellectual properties of contemporary Caribbean masquerade cultures. McIntyre is also Creative Director and Lead Designer at Dolly Mas Visual and Performing Arts Company. She is internationally recognised for her award-winning work. She was previously Art Administrator at New Local Space (NLS), an art studio and gallery based in Kingston, Jamaica. In 2020 McIntyre was part of the faculty for La Pràctica Artists Residency, and an advisor for the NLS, Curatorial, and Art Writing Fellowship. In 2021, she was awarded a Futuress Coding Resistance Fellowship for her project Mapping Queer Carnival. In 2023 she was longlisted for the prestigious Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.
Doc McLemore (they/them) is a writer in New Orleans. Their book, Consequences of My Birth is forthcoming with University Press of Kentucky. Their work centers on gendered bodies, sexuality, and the roots of relationships.
Marian D Moore grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana and works in the city of New Orleans. An early reader, her parents encouraged a love of both science and literature. Her fiction has been published in the anthology Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, the online journal Rigorous, and the anthology Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora. Her poetry has been published in the journals Drumvoices, The Louisiana Review and Bridges, Asimov’s SF magazine, the anthologies Mending for Memory: Sewing in Louisiana Essays, Stories, and Poems, Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora and I am New Orleans. Her book of poetry, Louisiana Midrash, was published by UNO Press/Runagate in January 2019.
A native of Mississippi, Benjamin Morris is the author of Coronary (Fitzgerald Letterpress, 2011), Hattiesburg, Mississippi: A History of the Hub City (Arcadia/History Press, 2014), Ecotone (Antenna, 2017), and The Singing River (Belle Point Press, 2025). He holds an MSc in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh, and among other honors has received a Pushcart nomination, the Academy of American Poets Prize from Duke University, and the Chancellor’s Medal for Poetry from the University of Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D. The recipient of academic and creative fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission and Tulane University, his writing appears regularly in the United States and Europe. He lives in New Orleans.
Leah Myers is a member of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe of the Pacific Northwest. She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of New Orleans where she was won the Samuel Mockbee Award for nonfiction two years in a row. In early 2024, she was presented with the Rupert Costo medal for her impact on indigenous communities. Leah now lives in Alabama, with roots in Georgia, Arizona, and Washington. Her work has previously appeared in The Atlantic, Craft Literary Magazine, Fugue Journal, and elsewhere. Her debut memoir, Thinning Blood, is published by W.W. Norton and received a rave review in the New York Times.
M.A. Nicholson is a New Orleans poet, journalist, editor, and educator whose writing appears in Best New Poets 2022, Tilted House Review, Diode Poetry Journal, New Orleans Review, Bear Review, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection Around the Gate was selected for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection. An alumna of Loyola University and a M.F.A. graduate from the University of New Orleans—where she served as Associate Poetry Editor for Bayou Magazine—M.A. was the recipient of the 2021 Andrea-Saunders Gereighty Academy of American Poets Award and is the co-founder of LMNL Arts, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting writers and fostering community through readings, workshops, festivals, anthologies, and more. She spends most of her days teaching creative writing at The Willow School. Connect with M.A. at www.michellenicholsonpoetry.com
James Nolan’s latest book is the memoir Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar: The Pandemic Years in New Orleans (2024). His Flight Risk won the 2018 Next-Generation Indie Book Award for Best Memoir. He has also published three prize-winning books of fiction, four poetry collections, and a translation of Pablo Neruda’s Stones of the Sky (Copper Canyon Press). Awarded both Fulbright and Javits fellowships, he has taught at universities in Barcelona, Madrid, San Francisco, and Beijing, as well as in his native New Orleans, where he now lives.
Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Foundation for Louisiana, and the Academy of American Poets, who awarded her a Poets Laureate Fellowship to support the Lifelines Poetry Project, which bring poetry workshops to Louisiana Prisons and Communities. The New Orleans Poetry Festival is her community partner in that work. Alison’s two most recent poetry collections are Our Lady of Bewilderment (2022) and Waterlines (2016), both with LSU Press. Alison is Writer-in-Residence at Southeastern Louisiana University.
Karisma Price is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. A poet and screenwriter, she is the author of I'm Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023) which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick. Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry, Indiana Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, and elsewhere. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and is the 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University.
Nick Reading is the author of Love & Sundries (Split Lip Press) and The Party in Question, winner of the Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Mid-American Review, Cortland Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and others. Visit him at www.nickreading.com
Fernando Rivera is a New Orleans native and graduate of UNO's Creative Writing Workshop. His Catholic High School comedy one-act Ants in Magnolias or Most Holy Trinity received a reading in fall of 2022. His one-act 52 Schill or Butter & Chocolate received a reading with lmnl summer 2023 at the Domino on St. Claude, featuring Big Easy Award winning and nominated actors. The Words and Music Festival hosted a lmnl-produced reading of Southern tragic-comic one-act, What Do You Mean, Abilene? at the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice fall 2024. He read and performed a ten-minute play, Good in the Neighborhood of Evil, at the Domino for lmnl’s WinterFest. His thesis, a full-length stage adaptation of Andrew Holleran's 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance, received a coffee shop workshop with the author during the 2024 Tennessee Williams Literary Festival.
Kristina Kay Robinson is a poet, visual artist and essayist born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her written, visual and curatorial practice centers and interrogates the modern and ancient connections between world communities. Robinson’s work both at home and abroad focuses on the impact of globalization, militarism, and surveillance on society and their intersections with contemporary art and pop culture. Her writing in various genres has appeared in Art in America, Guernica, The Baffler, The Nation, The Massachusetts Review and Elle among other outlets. Robinson is a 2019 recipient of the Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism. Currently she serves as the New Orleans editor at large for Burnaway magazine.
Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was born in Hialeah, Florida, and graduated from Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He has an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. Romaguera has been published in Passages North, Catapult, Massachusetts Review, Islandia Journal, Latino Book Review and other publications. He is a monthly columnist at The Ploughshares Blog and was the Poetry Editor at Peauxdunque Review. He is a VONA alum. Romaguera was a 2023 Periplus Fellow. His translation of the novel, Charras, will be published next year by UNO Press. He is currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript describing the trips he has taken to Cuba, where his father was born.
A.E. Rooks hopes to always be a student of history, which hasn’t stopped her from studying everything else. While her forthcoming debut, The Black Joke: The True Story of One Ship's Battle Against the Slave Trade, explores a little discussed facet of the transatlantic slave trade, previous writing credits include Between the Briefs, for which she won two national awards for sex positive journalism.
A two-time Jeopardy! champion whose schooling spans theatre, law, library and information science, education, human sexuality, Rooks' literary passions are united by what the past can teach us about the present, how history shapes our future, and above all, really interesting stories.
Kalamu ya Salaam (b. 24 March 1947) is a writer, editor, photographer, and retired educator. He was born Vallery Ferdinand III in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. He is a veteran who served on a nuclear missile base in South Korea. Inspired by the poetry of Langston Hughes and the civil rights movement, Salaam became interested in writing and organizing for social change. He was a founder of BLACKARTSOUTH and changed his name to Kalamu ya Salaam, which is Kishwahili for “pen of peace.”
He and Ayo Fayemi-Robinson founded Runagate Press, which produces a series of New Orleans writers. Runagate publishes in partnership with the University of New Orleans Press (UNO Press). Salaam edited New Orleans Griot: The Tom Dent Reader (2018), which was the 2020 One Book/One New Orleans selection. His latest book of essays, Be About Beauty (2018), won the PEN Oakland award in 2019. Recent Runagate publications include Louisiana Midrash by Marian D. Moore and I Feel To Believe by Jarvis DeBerry. Publications in 2021 are I Am New Orleans - 36 poets revisit Marcus Christian’s definitive poem and Cosmic Deputy, a 50-year retrospective of poetry by Kalamu ya Salaam. His most recent books are the novel Walkin’ Blues and Seeing Black: Black Photography in New Orleans 1840 and Beyond.
Salaam was also a founder of NOMMO Literary Society. He was appointed to both the jazz and literature panels of the National Endowment of the Arts. He has been employed as the director of the Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Health Center, the executive director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, for thirteen years as the editor of the Black Collegian Magazine, and a DJ for WWOZ. He blogs at kalamu.com/neogriot
Mona Lisa Saloy, Ph.D. Louisiana Poet Laureate 2021-2023, is author, folklorist, Louisiana Folklife Commissioner, educator, and scholar of Creole culture in articles, documentaries, and poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina; Conrad N. Hilton Endowed Professor of English, Dillard University. Books: Red Beans & Ricely Yours (has a banned poem “The N Word”), won theT.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Second Line Home, on New Orleans Black Creole culture. Recent pubs: The Chicago Quarterly Review, Vol 33; “Introduction” to BlackFire!!! This Time II; Southern Voices: fifty contemporary poets, (Tom Mack & Andrew Geyer eds.) Literary Press, Lamar University, Fall 2024. Black Creole Chronicles: Poems (UNO Press 2023),choice for ONE BOOK ONE NEW ORLEANS 2024, & Book of the Month, The Whitney Plantation Museum. Mona Lisa Saloy writes for those who don’t or can’t tell Black Creole cultural stories. www.monalisasaloy.com Tweet to @redbeansista
Vanessa Saunders is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her experimental novel, The Flat Woman, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and will be published by Fiction Collective Two and University of Alabama Press. Her writing has appeared in magazines such as Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review, Passages North, and other journals. She currently works as a Professor of Practice at Loyola University New Orleans.
Ida Schenck is a senior in high school at New Harmony High and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts in the creative writing department. She is a New Orleans native born and raised and is passionate about the city especially in the face of climate change. She has been published in Friends Journal, Geaux Girl Magazine, and the Peauxdunque Review. Aside from reading and writing, she enjoys hiking, thrifting, and working out. She is currently working on endless writing for college applications and hopes to expand her horizons while staying close to home.
Amy Serrano, author of Saudades: Anthological Contemplations on Persons, Places, Identity and Time, is also an award-winning filmmaker, poet, fine arts photographer, and human rights activist.
Leona Sevick’s work appears in Orion, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, The Southern Review, and The Sun. She was a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholar and a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Fellow for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and she serves as advisory board member of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center. She has been supported by residencies at The Hambidge Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Leona is provost and professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature (she is an Asian American poet and essayist). She is the 2017 Press 53 Poetry Award Winner for her first full-length book of poems, Lion Brothers. Her new book of poems, The Bamboo Wife, was published in July 2024 by Trio House Press.
Ery Shin was born in Ames, Iowa, and raised in Manhattan for the first decade of her life, then Seoul for the second. She is the author of Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years, a study of Stein’s later experimental gestures and their philosophical implications within Hitler’s Europe. Spring on the Peninsula is her debut novel.
Among many things, Sha'Condria (“iCon”) Sibley is an Alexandria, Louisiana native and longtime New Orleans-based poet, writer, and multi-inspired healing artist, whose work spans across page, stage, canvas, music, talk radio, and short film. Sha’Condria shares art as a healing and liberation tool in many spaces, including inside prisons, juvenile detention centers, and schools. She has toured the college circuit nationally and has worked for over a decade (and counting) creating, organizing, and hosting arts-driven, community-centered events. A legendary multiple-time national poetry slam champion and multiple-time viral spoken word artist, she has appeared on TVOne's Verses and Flow, has performed on Essence Music Festival mainstage, and her work has been featured on many worldwide platforms including Huffington Post, For Harriet, Teen Vogue, and BBC World Radio. She is also featured on multiple recording projects alongside Grammy Award winning artists. Sha’Condria is the author of My Name Is Pronounced Holy: A Collection of Poems, Prayers, Rememberings, and Reclamations.
In 2006 Gian Francisco Smith, a lifelong New Orleans resident, returned home from his Katrina displacement inspired and motivated to help preserve the culture of his beloved city. A focus on spoken word proved to highlight Smith’s talents as well as pay homage to the griots before him that cultivated the oral traditions of Bulbancha. In 2008 Gian co-founded “Pass It On” open mic. It is currently the longest running open mic in the city of New Orleans and served as host venue for the three time national slam champion Team SNO. In 2011 Gian appeared in three promotional trailers and one episode of the HBO series Treme. The overwhelming response to his original poetry, highlighted by his piece “O’Beautiful Storm”, led to an interview on National Public Radio’s weekend Edition featuring a performance of his poem “You Betta Ask Somebody”. In the years to follow Gian’s work has graced many platforms from stages like Snug Harbor and various outdoor festivals, to inclusion in nationally distributed school textbooks and Louisiana literary magazine 64Parishes. Additionally he has been awarded many writing commissions; two of which include Tulane University for the poem “That is the Question”, and the NBA New Orleans Pelicans which commissioned three works including his New Orleans Black history poem “For the Culture”. Also an award winning filmmaker, Gian serves as festival director of the Black Film Festival of New Orleans which he founded in 2018.
Judy Lea Steele is an interdisciplinary poet, playwright, performer and producer. Her writing speaks in dual or dichotomous voice, often self-ventriloquy, using written and shaped text, multimedia and embodied performance. It has been shared and recognized in Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans and by the National Playwrights Conference. Most recently, her hybrid poem "TREE [BLANKS]" was published in Trampoline Poetry. An excerpt from her developing hybrid chapbook, "Rooms in Mind", was selected as the poetry runner up for the 2024 Patty Friedmann Writing Competition and is forthcoming in the next LMNL Arts anthology. Her essay “Hymn” was a creative non-fiction semi-finalist in the same. Judy recently completed her short film cinepoem, “Eve’s Ribs Lilith’s Lungs”, an international collaboration, and is now submitting. She is a 2023 MFAW graduate of the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. New Orleans is her soul filling home. And she talks to live oaks.
Sheila Sundar is the author of the novel, Habitations. Her writing has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi, and lives in New Orleans.
Torrence L. Taylor is a native New Orleans. In 2013 Torrence decided to make his passion his profession. Since then he has premiered several fashion shows and showcases. Torrence has had the honor of styling many artist from singers to poets etc. His approach to style is taken from his study of Black History predominantly the black man's style. Torrence company name is "SOUTHERN STYLE INTERNATIONAL". His motto as a fashion/wardrobe stylist is "HE DOESN'T CHANGE PEOPLE, HE EXPANDS THEM". He's not a celebrity stylist, he's a stylist to the STARS. Because everyone should SHINE. He is most notable from his mission work to help change the negative images of the BLACK MALE with his organized movement "NOLA NOBLES".
Gwen Thompkins is a New Orleans-based journalist, writer and PhD student in History at Tulane University. Her research interests are rooted in the historic rise of jazz and other New Orleans-centric music forms as essential expressions of personal and societal freedom worldwide. Since 2012, she has been the executive producer and host of the public radio program Music Inside Out, which showcases the unusually varied musical landscape of Louisiana. Thompkins was the longtime senior editor of NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon and later NPR’s East Africa bureau chief, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Following a fellowship at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, she has contributed stories and interviews to The New Yorker online, The Oxford American, NPR Music, WXPN’s World Café, The Massachusetts Review, and other outlets. Currently, she’s writing a book based on the Music Inside Out interviews. Find the full archive at: musicinsideout.org, and learn more at https://musicinsideout.wwno.org/
Akilah Toney is a published writer, spoken word artist, dancer, teaching artist, and digital creator from New Orleans, La. From beginning her journey in the study of creative writing and dance at age ten, Akilah investigates rhythm and word as sacred forms of communication that shape our human experiences and ultimately transform us. Through this Akilah calls upon her own identity and the histories of her Southern foremothers as praxis in her search of sacred rhythm. With a background in Psychology, Akilah prioritizes the intersection of wellness and arts for inter-generational Black, Brown, and Queer communities in order to nourish alternative modalities for community healing and flourishing. Akilah has been featured in Medium’s Heated magazine. Nola.com, Vogue.com, the New York Times, the I Am New Orleans Poetry Anthology, and the Jesuit Social Justice Research Institute monthly publication.
Nikki Ummel is a queer artist, editor, and educator in New Orleans. Nikki has been published or has work forthcoming with Gulf Coast, The Georgia Review, Black Lawrence Press, and others. She is the 2022 recipient of the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize and 2023 recipient of the Juxtaprose Poetry Award for her manuscript, Bloom. Nikki is the co-founder of LMNL, an arts organization focused on readings, workshops, and residencies. She has two poetry chapbooks, Hush (Belle Point Press, 2022) and Bayou Sonata (NOLA DNA, 2023), funded by the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation. You can find her on the web at www.nikkiummel.com
Kim Vaz-Deville specializes in New Orleans culture, African American studies, and Carnival traditions. For a decade, she was a professor of education at Xavier University of Louisiana and is currently a scholar-in-residence at Dillard University. She is an expert on the Mardi Gras Baby Dolls, highlighted in The 'Baby Dolls': Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition and Walking Raddy: The Baby Dolls of New Orleans. Vaz-Deville's work focuses on the intersection of gender, race, and performance, and preserving. interpreting, and celebrating Black cultural practices. She actively participates in cultural preservation projects, fostering community and scholarly engagement through workshops, exhibitions, and interdisciplinary scholarship on Louisiana's heritage.
Eric Waters: I am fortunate to have been born and raised in New Orleans a city rich in an African Retentive Culture. My first camera was a Polaroid with which I photographed the Black Masking Indians of New Orleans and anything I found interesting. I had no concept of what photography entailed other an interesting instant picture. I had the great honor of meeting Marion Porter one of New Orleans historic Photographers. He agreed to mentor me after being asked to do so by an acquaintance who recognized my interest in photography. Thus began my journey in capturing images rather than photos.
Melissa A. Weber is an artist-scholar and music historian whose areas of interest and expertise include 20th century popular music, the music and culture of her native New Orleans, and archives. She serves as curator of the Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz, a unit of Tulane University Special Collections. As an adjunct professor, she teaches History of Urban Music at Loyola University New Orleans. She has presented her work and research at meetings for the American Musicological Society, International Association for the Study of Popular Music, National Council for Black Studies, and Society of American Archivists, among others. In her spare time, and under the moniker of DJ Soul Sister, she has hosted her Soul Power show on WWOZ FM New Orleans community radio station for 30+ years. As a performance DJ, she has performed with artists ranging from Questlove to George Clinton & Parliament-Funkadelic.
Bri Whetstone is a local attorney at McCranie Sistrunk Anzelmo Hardy McDaniel & Welch, who practices intellectual property and entertainment law. Before joining the practice of law, she worked at LucasArts in San Francisco in Business Affairs where she handled Copyright applications, drafted contracts, managed international trademarks, and drafted the Lucas Companies’ social media policy. She graduated magna cum laude from Tulane Law School in 2013, where she served as a longtime Ella Project pro bono volunteer. She has presented workshops for Ella since 2017, and has designed the Music Business Intensive.
Michael Allen Zell is a New Orleans-based novelist, screenwriter, journalist, and playwright. He is best known for his crime fiction series featuring Bobby Delery, a Tulane University Criminology professor, who is forced to right wrongs on the streets of New Orleans. The L.A. Review of Books praised with, “Zell demonstrates a gallows humor and a fine ear for entertainment...like the best crime fiction, the story invests deeply in setting, and it succeeds by virtue of its author’s palpable love for New Orleans and the people who live there.” Susan Larson in The Times-Picayune said, “What really keeps us turning pages is Zell’s authorial voice, his insights into human nature, and the dark sense of humor that comes out of observing city life.”