Reading

What a poetic privilege it’s been to put on The Splice Poetry Series which has spanned 5 calendar years in a city well-touted for its art-mindedness. And no bigger honor that from the ashes of our electrical fire on April 16 will begin this year’s New Orleans Poetry Festival (you know the one 😉). Over half of the poets who have read for Splice over the years will convene @thesaturnbar for NOPF opening night, performing a single poem each. One last zip-zap for the masses!!! ⚡️💥 🫟

As part of recent Louisiana State Poet Laureate, Alison Pelegrin’s Lifelines Poetry Project and in partnership with the New Orleans Poetry Festival, Louisiana State Penitentiary—commonly known as Angola—opens its gates to poetry in an unprecedented event of artistic expression and solidarity. This landmark performance brings together renowned poets to transform a space long defined by confinement into one of creativity and shared humanity. This represents a bold step forward in recognizing the role of art in healing, rehabilitation, and social change.

The New Orleans Poetry Festival takes the show on the road to Thibodaux in 2026. In partnership with Nicholls State University, this bilingual Spanish/English event features Mexican performers Lucia Hinojosa Gaxiola and Román Luján, along with Louisiana poets, Christopher Monier, Rachel Zavecz, & Rodrigo Toscano. After a performance of their work, these poets will hold a brief Q&A. Free and open to the public, this event will take place on Wednesday, April 15th, 1PM in Le Bijou Theater in the Donald G.

Join New Orleans poet, performer, and cultural organizer Chuck Perkins, for a performance from his debut collection, Beautiful and Ugly Too. Born and raised in Pigeon Town and now the owner of Café Istanbul, Perkins brings to the stage the same candor, rhythm, and storytelling energy that animate his poems and essays, which explore the city’s beauty, contradictions, and deep cultural roots. The book offers an unflinching yet loving view of New Orleans—its history, inequities, humor, and humanity. Award winning New Orleans poet Skye Jackson moderates the event.

One defining characteristic of the ecstatic is what scholar D.J. Moores calls “radical self-transcendence”: a desire for which has frequently called readers to poetry, even across distinct literary traditions. Yet, despite ecstasy being a traditional poetic subject, poets today are still finding ways to renew this rupture of—and also beyond—self. In this reading, five emerging poets—Darius Atefat-Peckham, Gauri Awashti, Isabella DeSendi, Sebastián H. Páramo, and Phil SaintDenisSanchez—will dive into the role of ecstasy in their writing.

"Theresa, I Miss You," is a durational installation/performance piece, part of an evolving body of work dedicated to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Best known for her seminal autoethnography Dictée (1982), Cha was a Korean American conceptual artist and writer working across film and video, performance, and visual art. She has been canonized as a seminal figure of Asian American poetics, and her work has been exceptionalized for its resistance to the false binary often posited in postwar U.S.

This poetry reading highlights contemporary Latin American poetry that actively shapes visions of sustainable collective futures in the face of climate and political crises.

Some writers adopt the language of their place of exile or refuge: the Polish writer Czesław Miłosz wrote in English, while the Irish writer Samuel Beckett wrote in French. The Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf, who also adopted French in her writing, explains in The Iliterate that this language gave her the necessary distance from the pain she felt for her homeland, Hungary.

This reading and performance event will feature the work of four poets writing against empire. "Against" here resonates not only as a preposition, expressing relation and the fact that empire is the prevailing environment, the primary constitutive force of the world-system, but "against" also indicates the ardent anti-imperialism that motivates and shapes the poetics of these four poets. The reading will engage and indicate different angles of attack, and a diversity of aesthetic tactics in expressing & embodying critique of empire  and US imperialism.

An inventive improvisation featuring Mixe trombonist Kunt Vargas with poets Christopher Rey Pérez and Andrés Paniagua, curated by diSONARE editors Diego Gerard Morrison & Lucia Hinojosa Gaxiola.