Reading

Readings by NOPF Poets

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

Readings by NOPF Poets

Readings by NOPF poets.

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.

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,".

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.

Directions

Driving: Google map link.
Lyft or Uber: search for Newcomb Art Museum or intersection of Willow and Newcomb.
From streetcar on St. Charles: walk to Bldg 82 on this campus map (about six blocks).

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. 

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

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.