Reading

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. 

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

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.

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.