2023 Events with Descriptions

For our Locals Night Opening Gala and Fundraiser we partner with The Splice Poetry Series to curate a showcase of New Orleans poets actively engaged in the community. Encompassing a broad range of subjects, poetics, and performances, these poets testify to the city’s vibrant and diverse sensibilities. The local features will be joined by Roxi Power, who presents “A Neo-Benshi Streetcar".

https://youtu.be/ZA3gU_hw-vU

Our famous International Night this year features bi-lingual and English readings by Brazilian and Brazilian-American poets Catarina Lins, Salgado Maranhão, Omar Salomão, Narlan Matos Teixeira, and Lia Vieira, co-sponsored by Tulane University Department of Spanish and Portuguese, curated by Christopher Dunn, chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Tulane. 
This event is on the Tulane campus, in Stone Auditorium in the Woldenberg Art Center on Newcomb Place, just off Willow.

https://youtu.be/xWR8OZcobNI

Book tables and socializing in the Grand Hall at NOHC. 9 AM to 5 PM

“Poetry is language whose through-passage leaves poet, reader, and itself somehow changed.” – Jane Hirschfield

In her 2013 essay, “Poetry, Transformation, and the Column of Tears,” Jane Hirschfield writes, "When the shape of the outer alters, the inner must shift to meet it, or we will be left in broken incoherence inside our own lives." Since long before 2020, poetry has given us the tools to reshape our inner worlds to meet exterior changes. When the pandemic hit, lockdown silenced much of the world, and in that space, a vacuum opened to new landscapes of meaning. What is the role of poetry in a time of chaos? What does it mean to adapt to unprecedented times? What comes next? In this panel, poets Stacey Balkun, Carolyn Hembree, Jade Hurter, and Tiana Nobile will discuss the writing practices that sustained them during the pandemic and share the poems they wrote and read during the first three years of the altered world.

This panel will showcase the lingering and salutary influence on American poetry of the poets of the New York School: John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. The New York School Diaspora is wide-ranging, consisting of writers who honor the virtues of play, wit, the chaos of reality, and the belief that, to paraphrase Frank O’Hara, life is too important to strangle with seriousness. This tradition deserves not only more adherents but more recognition and analysis from critics. The panelists will read some of their own New York School-inspired poems and discuss the School’s importance to their work and to American poetry.

https://youtu.be/bIc4KgwllD4

Join Antonio Addessi(Sleeptalking, 2022) and Daniel W. K. Lee(Anatomy of Want, 2019) in a reading to celebrate this years newest additions to Rebel Satori Press—Octavio Gonzalez and Scott Hightower. The reading is a celebration of Octavio's debut full length volume of poetry Limerance and Scott's first book published under Rebel Satori Imperative to Spare. Rebel Satori Press is an independent small press based in New Orleans that has been publishing LGBTQ Poetry and the Occult for over twenty years.

Protest poetry informs us about crisis, attempting to inspire change among human beings. This roundtable, however, addresses an increasingly common variety of protest poetry that delivers its petitions for change to the more-than-human world. Participants Cynthia Hogue, Lesley Wheeler, Pamela Uschuk, and Andy Young will discuss the stakes and audiences of prayers and spells; what stylistic and structural elements help focus such a poem’s energy; and what social, environmental, and personal transformations the authors seek. Each poet will comment on these questions and read a few poems. The event will close with several writing prompts to inspire the audience to experiment with this powerful mode.

https://youtu.be/dUunM-OStho

Please join Meadowlark Press for a reading by Alison Hicks, Olive Sullivan, and Linzi Garcia, on the theme of emerging from isolation. Each poet will read from collections that take on a new perspective of what it means to be isolated--due to the pandemic, terminal illness, or incarceration--and what it takes to come out on the other side.  Alison Hicks will read from her Birdy Poetry Prize collection, Knowing Is a Branching Trail. This collection gives us a strong sense of how a poet might survive a season of pandemic isolation by extracting poetry from the ordinary beat of life, whether that involves getting a starling out of her house or playing the cello after many years of letting it lay silent. Olive Sullivan will read from both of her Meadowlark collections, Wandering Bone and Skiving Down the Bones. She writes, “Long before the pandemic locked us all into our homes, my personal period of isolation began with my 2017 diagnosis of Acute Myleoid Leukemia, a particularly deadly and fast-acting cancer.” Her books show us how one woman faces her own impending death, endures the loss of her closest loved ones, and takes on the world afterward, very much alive. Linzi Garcia will be reading from the most recent Meadowlark poetry collection, I've been fighting this war within myself by Antonio Sanchez-Day, who passed away last year. Antonio was incarcerated for 13 years, due to gang activity and other crimes. This poetry collection shares his writings during and after his isolation in the county jail. He wrote these poems as a way to turn his life around and eventually to gain literal and figurative freedom. 

Four Mississippi poets, Ellie Black, Melissa Ginsburg, Maggie Graber, and C.T. Salazar, will read from recent work. These writers navigate issues of queerness, gender, power, and the divine. Because where we’re from shapes how we speak, there’s an interdependent relationship between voice and landscape. These works dwell in landscapes natural and technological, shaped by history, myth, ecology, and pop culture. They are interested in psychology, violence, and trauma, operating at the intersection of the monstrous and the human. Enlivened by lush imagery, sonic play, humor, and formal innovation, these poems present angels and video game glitches, dead gods and endangered wild spaces, as sites of possibility, longing, and transformation.

https://youtu.be/S2hc5QG9kOQ

Roof Books presents a group reading hosted by editor James Sherry. The reading will include Roof authors Evelyn Reilly (Styrofoam, an iconic poem on climate change, and Ecolocation), Uche Nduka (Scissorwork, a piercing adventure through fragmented and recombined political landscapes), Kit Robinson (Thought Balloon and 4 other Roof Books), Norman Fischer (Nature and many other titles), Lonely Christopher (The Resignation, In a January Would and others) & James Sherry (editor).

https://youtu.be/BI6yWhJZTj0

This panel stages encounters between poets, fiction writers, and translators with the infrastructure of capitalist life—from physical infrastructure, like concrete barriers, to institutional infrastructures like hospitals, universities, and financial institutions. Our responses will ask how literary practice can challenge and transform the infrastructures we live within. Toby Altman will present selections from his forthcoming book, Discipline Park, which traces the demolition of Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago—and treats the demolition as an allegory of neoliberalism. Kelly Krumrie will read from her chapbook Infrastructural, which follows a speaker's engagements with sidewalks, concrete barriers, gas lines, and construction. She turns down various streets, walks, turns around, gets lost. Men come and go; there are aluminum signs. The sentences---using technical, institutional, and plain language---layer on top of one another like felled bricks. Jack Jung will read from his forthcoming translation of Kim Hyesoon's "Thus Spoke n't" (2016). In some of these lyrical passages that often deal with life in modern-day Seoul, Kim Hyesoon muses about teaching creative writing at an institution of higher learning, and what it means to be part of such an institution for supposedly training young artists and writers. Often bitingly witty, some of Kim Hyesoon's writings in this collection reveal to us what the institutionalization of creative writing instruction has been in contemporary South Korea. Jose-Luis Moctezuma will read from his forthcoming Black Box Syndrome, which articulates the tension between lyric excess and digital compaction that encodes poetic discourse in the age of pandemic. Over and against the corrosive world-shrinking effects of Wall Street risk management and futures trading, the black boxes in this book propose a counter-divination that distorts, deranges, and decolonizes the logic of empire. 

https://youtu.be/mrjpw8YrbxA

Until recently, Jewish poetics have largely been seen as parochial, disconnected from both conversations about aesthetics and general cultural trends. Recently, a widespread interest in diasporas and migrations have brought new ways of viewing Jewish poetics, allowing us to examine them as both a contemporary phenomenon, and an ancient written tradition. Midrash is a poetic technique invented more than two thousand years ago to derive text from given text. In this panel, four practitioners of "Jewish poetry" will read from their own work, and the work of other Jewish poets, and comment on the new/old technique of midrash and what it brings to our contemporary strangeness. We will discuss how Jewish history informs today’s poetics, and how the Jewish poetry of today provides essential commentary on the broader culture.

As a poetry festival situated in the cultural capital of the Gulf South, the New Orleans Poetry Festival serves as a meeting ground for poets and critics from across this region at the same time as it showcases these writers to the rest of the country and the world. NOPF 2023 offers the first entry in what we hope to be a new series, this talk on Gulf South Poetics, exploring recent trends in a specific Gulf South region or state. This talk will focus on Mississippi, which has seen a resurgence of national-level poetic work appearing in the last decade. Contextualizing this work and offering a detailed overview of the concerns, themes, styles, and politics that currently occupy the attention of Mississippi-based poets, this lecture will discuss the poetry of Natasha Trethewey, Beth Ann Fennelly, Adam Clay, Derrick Harriell, Aimee Nezukumatathil, Joshua Nguyen, Catherine Pierce, Melissa Ginsburg, and more, with a full bibliography provided. Benjamin Morris will deliver the talk, approximately 30 minutes, and CT Salazar will serve as respondent, followed by an audience discussion.

https://youtu.be/r7DUAB--oMQ

Early in my first year of teaching high school, I was surprised to learn that many of my students, mostly white 11th graders from affluent families, had never stepped foot on a streetcar even though New Orleans was barely a 20-minute drive from campus. Realizing this was indicative of a vast cultural divide, I decided we would hit the streets. The result was the creation of generative, community-minded writing prompts accessible to anyone at any age, an interactive rotating menu of sorts that I called Mouth Fools. To put the practice into action I contacted a friend who taught at a nearby public school to ask if he would be willing to host my students for a creative community project. Less than 15 miles down the road, the school was a world away for my students. After two hours of interaction, however, in was clear that, through their immersive experience, they had learned a lesson in empathy. They had joined a group that was “other” and saw individuals as clearly as they saw themselves. Soon after, we literally took to the streets by entering New Orleans neighborhoods with which my students were unfamiliar and invited passersby to participate in the generative exercises Mouth Fools provided. My students were able to consider multiple viewpoints and to reflexively challenge their own beliefs and practices. They not only critiqued normative, hegemonic forces that shaped their daily lives, but created products that spoke back to those forces. Since its inception, I have reshaped Mouth Fools to meet the needs of my respective students and their representative communities. I would like to bring its current iteration to the 2023 New Orleans Poetry Festival to help poets learn simple, generative practices and to help teachers introduce similar approaches in their classrooms.

Holland Hopson and Hank Lazer have been collaborating for several years on a range of poetry-music interactions, including the 15 tracks (available on Bandcamp and YouTube) from field recordings   of mind   in morning (BlazeVOX 2021). They have also developed 10 minutes poetry-music videos for Brush Mind 1 & 2.  For NOPF 2023 they will be presenting a range of poetry-music live collaborations – performances to include poetry and banjo, electronics, and guitar.

https://youtu.be/JxDQ1J17uRY

Saturnalia Books authors Moncho Alvarado, Timothy Liu, Kristi Maxwell, Rob Ostrom, and Natalie Shapero will read from their work in celebration of the newly published anthology Lords of Misrule: 20 Years of Saturnalia Books.

Some poems are rowdy, trouble-making, rabble-rousing, and rebellious—full of insurrection, revolution, and mutiny—and some poems aim to take that charge a step further. Poems that want to strip the paint off the wall and then take the wall down with a wrecking ball and pummel the plaster to dust. Poems that make you wince with absolute delight. James Kimbrell, Stefene Russell, Kerry James Evans and Travis Mossotti will share the stage to read some of their most subversive and delightful poems from recent and forthcoming collections, followed by a Q&A session.

https://youtu.be/pv80UEfmXUk

How are poets in Oklahoma using poetry to serve diverse, marginalized communities outside of the usual channels and to effect positive social changes in a state that consistently ranks quite low in terms of socio-economic indicators and that continues to pass some of the most regressive legislation in the US? This roundtable will feature poets working with collectives, on radio shows, on immigration issues, and in archives, public schools, and prisons. They will discuss their paths, methods, outcomes, insights, and future plans as well as read related work.

Join us as we launch two striking new books by Adeena Karasick, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings and Aerotomania: The Book of Lumenations. Adeena will perform work from the books, followed by a signing and reception.

Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings

Inscribing what Levinas might call “espace vital” (the space we can survive), Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings is an ecstatically wrought, never quite post-Covid celebration/trepidation of openings, written by Adeena Karasick and visualized by master book artist/vis lit pioneer Warren Lehrer

Aerotomania: The Book of Lumenations

"Punning with conceptual condensations until pleasures become fireworks, joyously singing the language dynamic, displaying heartfelt learning, sexy switch-ups and flights of insight, this work by Adeena Karasick is a gasp-worthy balance of poetic eros, theoretical intelligence, and luminous suspicion..." —Rachel Blau DuPlessis

https://youtu.be/NmYOnAdoQqg

Dillard University Department of English presents readings and performances by students.

This roundtable will feature a discussion and readings by three poets currently based in the south whose work could be considered in Post-Confessionalist. Each poet will discuss and read from recent projects, touching on how their work engages with the Anthropocene as a geologic age that threatens humanity, and how this thread to larger humanity plays a role in their routine dramas and ongoing life choices. The roundtable will engage the audience and end with ideas on how to incorporate similar themes and lenses in their own work. Kimberly Ann Southwick will chair the panel and speak about her work, and two other poets will be featured, Spencer Silverthorne and Maxwell Gontarek.

A reading featuring past and upcoming contributors, alongside editors, celebrating the release of the latest issue of Annulet and its first two years of publication. Participants from across the journal's five issues will read from their own work, each of which inquires into the porous infrastructures of rural life and experience, from the peripheral to the speculative, in poems that think with hobo markers, transit and poverty, hopping trains, desertifications, austerity's dilapidations, hidden extraction economies, water scarcities, and absurd transpositions of such structures into space. Readers and editors will also discuss, inviting audience contribution, Annulet's future as ongoing intervention and bright light in critical and rigorous inquiries, rooted into leftist and ecopoetic orientations, into poetics both of prose and poetry, literary criticism, and essay forms that are scholarly at heart and approachable in practice.

https://youtu.be/gFM-8QrizYs

Join us at Café Istanbul for our feature reading with Pulitzer Prize-winner Tyehimba Jess and Fence Books Motherwell Prize-winner, poet and choreographer Harmony Holiday.

https://youtu.be/OQpe2YlzhAA

Book tables and socializing in the Grand Hall at NOHC. 9 AM to 5 PM

We create and receive sound through the body, whether heard or not. Four experiential writers share sound exercises as they relate to writing practices.  

SABRINA DALLA VALLE Does making sound more dimensional make it more true? The podcast vocalscape is seen as an auditive framework, a potential sound space for centering in the listener’s own story—the in-between story possibly being the true sound space. In this presentation, we will practice hearing with the soul, listening not to words— but to powers, through a guided experience of different vocalscapes.   

AMBER DiPIETRA Let us consider situations in which the method of production is the work of art. I have had a chronic illness for 42 years. I am physically disabled, and I am mostly blind. The physical production of poetry and other installation work is now my product. The way my body functions completely dictates the form and content of the work I make—like audio journaling constrained by technical limits and textual editing bounded by my waning ability to scan the eye over a block of text. 

EMGEE DUFRESNE: Is it possible to enter a practice of writing grounded in the somatic?  How can the senses become a vessel for poetic possibility?  I explore these questions with an experiment using titration, sound via a tuning fork and singing bowl. This will be documented for the audience by someone receiving abdominal work, while stimulated by these sounds.

DENISE LETO When do voice and silence become beacons or burdens of embodied poetics? I have a neuro-speech and chronic pain disability which has transformed my relationship to poetry and movement. How can speech and poetry involve a vocabulary of imagination and a kinesthesia of connection within non-normative vocalizations? My creative art practice now involves collaborations in sound/text art, dance, and video. To explore these questions, I will share exercises in how to create a more embodied trust field together through vibrational and silent meditation, sensory resonance, movement and observation of breath cycles.

This is a combined panel and reading on writing about illness, whether that be of a mental or physical nature. Each poet on the panel will read a bit of their work, followed by a discussion about the work and the various approaches the panel members take to address-- or not address-- illness. The work of each of these panel members explores the many stages, and ways of processing illness, disease, and health. 

https://youtu.be/K8jb8j353bU

https://youtu.be/x01VPVpUiTs

Readings from recent and forthcoming Lavender Ink and Diálogos Books authors.

https://youtu.be/TK8BRenMOC0

As a regional small press focused on the Mid-South, we are eager to explore the ways that this in-between part of the country relates to more established regions like the South/Deep South and the Midwest. We are especially interested in supporting work by writers from states that border our home base of Arkansas to explore conversations across our borders. This reading features three of our current/forthcoming Louisiana poets: Nikki Ummel, Madeline Trosclair-Rotolo, and Alison Pelegrin.

This panel will feature writers whose work engages practices of invocation and poetic summoning, calling on the dead to be collaborators, whether as a spiritual practice or ego challenge or something in between/else. Panelists will discuss their reasons for writing beyond the self, opening oneself and one’s writing up to inhabitation, animating intertextuality, and reconfiguring theories of influence, then they will read some of their pertinent writing.

https://youtu.be/rlB8iXqn_Gg

Emily Marie Passos Duffy, Natalie Earnhart, Stephanie Kaylor, Aristilde Kirby, Dylan Krieger, and Shay Reynolds join forces to engage the glistening intersections of sex work and poetry. Dominate media representations have been created by those whose standpoints limit them from seeing the full realities of all who engage in sex work. Sex workers have long been pigeonholed as metaphor or muse, criminal or victim, empowered or dis-empowered through culturally influenced vectors such as media, social media, and puritanical ideologies. We are all of the above, none of the above, some of the above and then some. Between duality, and beyond. This reading features poets from all over the country and many corners of the industry. Each poet will discuss and read from recent projects, as well as discuss issues including sex worker representation, the dual nature of increasing visibility in movements for sex workers’ rights, pedagogical practices related to writings of erotic labor, affect theory, and stigmatization–as well as how these issues and subsequent resistance are made manifest in spaces dedicated to the literary arts.

BlazeVOX Books, based in Buffalo, New York, has presented wide ranging fields of contemporary poetry since its founding in 2000 by Geoffrey Gatza. Coal Hill Review writes that "BlazeVOX poetry collections tend to have three things in common: physically, they tend to be oversized and very attractive; stylistically, they tend to be experimental; and quality-wise, they tend to be strong." This reading will feature a variety of voices published by or forthcoming from this press. 

A reading and visual presentation of visual poetry, digital and analog works, by Terri Witek, Dona Mayoora, and Kristine Snodgrass. All women have published works world-wide including in the WAAVe Global Gallery Anthology 2021. Visual Poetry including asemics, glitch, and concrete (or New Concrete) is rapidly expanding in scope and defintion. In the past two years two anthologies of women in visual poetry have proven to be seminal texts in the ever growing (expanding) fields. Visual Poetry has advanced beyond erasure and collaged text to include new modes of digital, including AI and glitch, performance, textile, and sound and video. Witek, Mayoora, and Snodgrass have all collaborated with other visual poets and their work can be found in anthologies, journals, and critical essay/articles. 

Please join us as we share ideas, texts, and creative practices integrating poetry and cultural critique and toward ceasing the destruction of ecosystems, habitats, biomes, communities and other climate consequences. We’ll also consider poetic practices that examine colonialist/ appropriative cultural mindsets, restore relationships, and help us to think about moving through climate crises into new relational contexts and systems. 

Workshop leaders will spend some time sharing research, investigations, practices, and creative projects before opening the space to discussion and writing activities. We’ll draw on a decolonial poetics of relational healing, urban walking, southern literature, and close engagement with natural and cultural environments and we’ll invite participants into exploratory exercises for generating ideas and creative works toward a critical and potentially healing poetics of climate and culture.

Black Fire This Time Reading & Autographing. Group reading and autographing session at a small press bookfair table with the poets from Black Fire This Time (2022), the critically-acclaimed anthology featuring over 100 award-winning poets and writers on the history and legacy of the Black Arts Movement. MacArthur Fellow Ishmael Reed describes Black Fire This Time as "the genius of black folk." Praised as nearly 60 years in the making, this anthology contains work from across the United States, Caribbean and Africa.

The focus of this reading will be on the poetry of environmental crisis. The six readers all write about climate change, and in particular disappearing coastlines. Our reading will explore history and memory as our poems try to imagine an unimaginable future.  Questions our poems raise include:  what is the meaning of home in the Anthropocene? how does the idea of home change when we are faced with precarity? What work can poetry do in the world to speak out about environmental destruction and ecological grief?

This panel will consist of BIPOC writers discussing the politics and poetics of agenre, mixed genre, cross-genre, and hybrid work, as well as the use of lyricism and antipoetry as a means of challenging typical poetic genres. The panelists will discuss how their individual works incorporate theory, song, visual art, plot, erasure and typography, and multiple voices and narrators as a means to break away from—and also break down—the idea of Western and/or “formal” poetic genre constructs. Additionally, we will also discuss the possibilities that occur when working with and against tropes and traditions, so that our conversation will speak to the speculative, comedic, tragic, romantic, mundane, and mysterious aspects that arise when one asks the question: What is poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and where is the line between them?