Virtual Event

This event was cancelled due to Kalamu's health concerns. We very much wish him a speedy recovery.

Lit Balm will kick off the 2022 New Orleans Poetry Festival with a show focusing on the life and work of New Orleans poet Kalamu ya Salaam. Presenters will read from Kalamu's work, discuss his work's importance, and engage in a direct discussion with Kalamu about his inspirations, directions, and accomplishments. The show will begin with poems from Lit Balm's hosts and end with an open mic. Full list of presenters to be announced.

A reading to celebrate the launch of the third issue of second factory, a journal from Ugly Duckling Presse. Second Factory showcases work from a variety of poets and artists in each issue. Spotted like a bird in the wild, heard as a grinding piece of machinery, Second Factory manifests in examples: an office park of shadows; a vast and boundless shed; a grape in the risograph; a butterfly in a net. Issue 3 features work by Virginie Poitrasson (tr.

Over two decades ago, a small group of New Orleans teacher-writers resolved to meet every other Sunday to read and critique each other's poetry "cold." Through the Hurricane Katrina aftermath and Covid-19 pandemic, this workshop has continued to meet. Original members of this poetry workshop will briefly discuss the origin and evolution of the group over the past twenty years. All group members will read poems that the workshop helped them re-envision. 90 minutes.

https://youtu.be/nACp4nC2ncc

This roundtable will feature a discussion and readings by three Louisiana-based poets who engage ecopoetics through different modes and lenses. Each poet will discuss and read from recent projects, highlighting the ecopoetical intersections with their other concerns as poets, humans, and readers. 

This panel will consist of several writers of color discussing the poetics of agenre, mixed genre, cross-genre, and hybrid work, as well as various approaches to lyricism and antipoetry in terms of building the “world” of a piece. The panelists will discuss how their individual works (and worlds) incorporate theory, song, visual art, plot, erasure and typography, and/or multiple voices and narrators as a means to break away from—and also break down—the idea of Western, “formal” constructs.

Queer history is innately informed by lack, by myriad lacunae. Our collective cultural consciousness is permeated by an intractable trajectory of systemic omissions, missing reels and redacted documents. Our subjective lineages are porous and incomplete, equally marked by loss and by potentiality. How can we explore the negative space within the archive, what film scholar Giuliana Bruno refers to as "streetwalking on a ruined map," as both a generative constraint and as a locus for utopian revisionism?

What topics and forms are deemed “poetic,” and what gets to become a poem? Formal or free verse, every text has the capacity to rupture familiar structures or elevate mundane objects. As poet Michele Battiste told Gulf Coast magazine, “Poetry bears witness. History is best documented not by scholars or journalists or writers of textbooks, but by poets and artists in all of our enraged or fascinated or seduced subjectivities.” What can the everyday tell us about history, about witness?

Poets and translators reading from recent Lavender Ink / Diálogos releases, featuring: