New Orleans Poetry Festival Board

Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a writer, editor and teaching artist from the Great Lakes currently living in the Gulf Coast. She is a 2020 Poetry Project Fellow, a 2016 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, and the founder of the The Seminary of Ecstatic Poetics, a non-traditional learning space for the poetically minded. Her debut poetry collection, Dereliction, is currently available via The Song Cave.

Stefene Russell is a recent New Orleans transplant by way of St. Louis and is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at the University of New Orleans. She was the 2018 Laumeier Sculpture Park poet-in-residence and is the author of 47 Incantatory Essays (Spartan Press, 2019), The Possum Codex (Otis Nebula, 2015) and Inferna (Intagliata Press, 2013). 

NOPF co-founder Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, musician, carpenter and publisher living in New Orleans. My ID, his eleventh book of poetry, was published by BlazeVOX in October, 2019. His novel trilogy, Three Letters, (comprised of Q, Little A, and The Private I) was released in 2021 by Spuyten Duyvil. His verse memoir, Memory Wing, called by Rodger Kamentetz "a contemporary autobiographical masterpiece," was published by Black Widow in 2011. A chapbook, surrealism, was published in 2016 and translated into Spanish by Enrique Solinas and Peter Thompson; the bilingual edition was released by Yauguru in Uruguay as surrealismo in 2017. Essays, fiction, poem-like objects and other ephemera appear regularly in Xavier Review, Fell Swoop, Southern Review, Jacket2 and other such print and online journals. 

He founded Lavender Ink, a small press devoted mainly to poetry, in 1995, and he founded Diálogos, an imprint devoted to cross-cultural literatures (mostly in translation) in 2011. Lavender Ink/Diálogos now has more than 200 books in print.

Read an interview with Bill about his poetics and about the press at Jacket2, or visit his Amazon author page.

He is the co-founder, with Megan Burns of Trembling Pillow Press, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival (i.e. this).

NOPF co-founder Megan Burns is the publisher at Trembling Pillow Press. She co-hosted the 17 Poets! Literary Series from 2002-2012 and hosted the Blood Jet Poetry Reading Series from 2013-2019 in New Orleans as well as founded The Dragonfly performance space in 2018. She is the co-founder of the New Orleans Poetry Festival. She has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, Trickhouse, and the Big Bridge New Orleans Anthology. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. She has four books Memorial + Sight Lines (2008), Sound and Basin (2013), Commitment (2015) and BASIC PROGRAMMING (2018) published by Lavender Ink. She has two recent chapbooks: Dollbaby (Horseless Press, 2013) and i always wanted to start over (Nous-Zot Press, 2014). Horse Less Press released her Twin Peaks chap, Sleepwalk With Me, in 2016. Her fifth book PLURALITY is forthcoming in 2023. 

Jonathan Penton founded the electronic journal Unlikely Stories in 1998, and continues to run it as editor-in-chief. He serves and has served in an editorial, management, or technical role for numerous arts organizations, including Big Bridge and MadHat, Inc. He now serves as Technical Director for the New Orleans Poetry Festival and Rigorous: a journal by people of color. He has organized literary performances, and performed himself, across the United States. His own books of poems are BACKSTORIES (Argotist Ebooks), Standards of Sadiddy (Lit Fest Press), Painting Rust and Blood and Salsa (Unlikely Books), and Last Chap (Vergin’ Press). He lives in New Orleans.

Henry Goldkamp (he/they) is an experimental poet and interdisciplinary artist whose work blurs the boundaries between poetry, visual art, and community performance through public installations of intermedia, such as an olfactory poem "read" through the nose (SUMMERTIMER, 2023), immersive clown utilizing audience participation (Balloon Animal, 2023), a grove of trees in which thousands of poems were hung for passersby to pluck and then mail to strangers out of a phonebook (The Poetree Project, 2014), and a citywide installation of 60+ typewriters—resulting in the first ever book to be composed by a city (What the Hell Is Saint Louis Thinking? 2013). By creating such spaces of dialogue and interactive expression, he encourages participants to connect with each other and their shared environment.

He lives in New Orleans, where he co-runs The Splice Poetry Series, acts as intermedia editor for the small press Tilted House, and teaches at Louisiana State University. Art and criticism appear in Indiana Review, Best New Poets 2021, Denver Quarterly, Works & Days, Accelerants, Volt, Triquarterly, Tyger Quarterly, Bat City Review (winner of the 2022 Hybrid Prize), Afternoon Visitor, DIAGRAM, and Annulet, among others. His public art projects have been covered by NPR's Morning Edition and Time and he was recently an artist-in-residence at Mary Sky in Vermont.

Skye Jackson was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Electric Literature, Green Mountains Review, RATTLE and elsewhere. Her chapbook A Faster Grave won the 2019 Antenna Prize. Her work has been a finalist for the 2023 Iowa Review Poetry Award, the RATTLE Poetry Prize, the RHINO Founders' Prize, and in 2021 she received the AWP Intro Journals Award. Skye's work was also selected by Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project. In 2022, she won the KGB Open Mic Contest in New York City, and served as the Writer-In-Residence at the Key West Literary Seminar in Florida. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Libre, will be published in the summer of 2024 by Regalo Press and distributed by Simon & Schuster. She currently teaches at Xavier University. 

​Jessica Kinnison's work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Phoebe, Entropy, Juked, and The Southern Humanities Review, among other publications. A 2018 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow, her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In April 2020, she was listed among eight New Orleans poets to watch in POETS & WRITERS. A Mississippi native, she is co-founder of the New Orleans Writers Workshop and host of the Dogfish Reading Series in New Orleans. She holds an MFA from Chatham University in Pittsburgh where she taught at the Allegheny County Jail.

A native of Mississippi, Benjamin Morris is the author of Coronary (Fitzgerald Letterpress, 2011), Hattiesburg, Mississippi: A History of the Hub City (Arcadia/The History Press, 2014), and Ecotone (Antenna/Press Street, 2017). His work appears in such places as The Oxford American, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Lithub, and The Southern Review, and has received fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, Tulane University, and A Studio in the Woods. Recently he won the 2021 Words & Music Writing Competition for Poetry, judged by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Formerly a resident of the United Kingdom, he now lives in New Orleans. http://benjaminalanmorris.com.

Sean F. Munro is a poet, filmmaker, Associate Professor of English, and Associate Editor for Lavender Ink / Diálogos. Sean is the executive director of the New Orleans Poetry Festival, curates The Splice Poetry Series, and manages LitWire: the literary events calendar of New Orleans. Publications & performances can be found at seanFmunro.com

Lisa Pasold is originally from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and has published 6 books. Her 2012 book, Any Bright Horse, was nominated for Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Poetry. She has been writing daily poems for two decades; the resulting work has appeared in magazines such as Fence, Room, and New American Writing. Lisa has taught Creative Writing at the American University in Paris and has worked as a journalist for publications such as The Chicago Tribune and Billboard Magazine; her favorite cocktail is the French75. www.lisapasold.com

Rodrigo Toscano is a poet and essayist based in New Orleans. He is the author of eleven books of poetry. His latest two books are The Cut Point (Counterpath, 2023), The Charm & The Dread (Fence Books, 2022). His previous books include In Range, Explosion Rocks Springfield, Deck of Deeds, Collapsible Poetics Theater (a National Poetry Series selection), To Leveling Swerve, Platform, Partisans, andThe Disparities. His poetry has appeared in over 20 anthologies, including Best American Poetry and Best American Experimental Poetry (BAX).  Toscano has received a New York State Fellowship in Poetry. He won the Edwin Markham 2019 prize for poetry. He works for the Labor Institute in conjunction with the United Steelworkers, the National Institute for Environmental Health Science, National Day Laborers Organizing Network educational / training projects that involve environmental and labor justice culture transformation. rodrigotoscano.com

Nam Hoang Tran is a multidisciplinary artist living in New Orleans. His work appears in Posit, The Brooklyn Review, ANMLY, New Delta Review, Tagvverk, Always Crashing, and Diode, among others. W/ Henry Goldkamp, he co-edits TILT – a journal of intermedia poetics.

Born & raised in New Orleans, Bernardo Wade tries at poems, catches elbows on the court, & rides his bike around Bloomington, IN, because IU funds his present period of studying with others. He currently serves as Editor & CNF Editor of Indiana Review. Though he’s published in a bunch of literary journals no one in his family has ever heard of, they remain proud of him, especially when they are featured in the poems. He's infatuated with Ed Roberson's question, "Can you O.D. on life?" Check out his website: bernardowade.com

Rachel Zavecz is a book artist, writer, and co-editor of the small press Carrion Bloom Books. Her first book, The Book is a Tower Always Never Watching, is forthcoming from Cloak, and her writing has appeared in DREGINALD, Always Crashing, Fatal Flaw, DIAGRAM, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at Loyola University New Orleans.