Jefferson Parish Library celebrates April’s national poetry month with four local poets

Four local poets will perform on four consecutive Monday nights during April, reading their poems and describing their vision of poetry at the East Bank Regional Library, 4747 West Napoleon Ave. in Metairie. This event is free and open to the public without registration.

  

Paris Tate

7 p.m., Monday, April 2, 2018

Born in New Orleans, Paris Tate graduated from the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts’ Creative Writing program in 2007 and received her bachelor’s degree in English with a journalism concentration from the University of New Orleans in 2011. Some of her poems have appeared in the Literary Yard, Contraband, and The New Guard Review, while her published news articles and columns have appeared in Bayou Buzz and Cognition. Her book of poems is titled All the Words in Between. She lives in New Orleans and works at the Jefferson Parish Library.

David Lanoue

7 p.m., Monday, April 9, 2018

David Lanoue is Professor of English, Xavier University New Orleans. His specialties are Medieval and World Literature, Translation (Japanese Haiku). He has taught at Xavier University since 1981. Lanoue earned his doctoral degree in medieval literature from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and his dissertation and early articles all dealt with European works: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; 14th century Spanish poetry, including the Libro de buen amor; 14th century French poetry, especially Guillaume de Machaut; and 17th century Spanish drama by Calderon de la Barca.

In the mid-1980s, he decided to learn Japanese and focus his critical attention on the one-breath art of haiku. He is especially interested in Issa. His first book, Issa: Cup-of-Tea Poems, Selected Haiku by Kobayashi Issa, came out in 1991. Other books have followed, including Pure Land Haiku: The Art of Priest Issa (2004) and a series of five "haiku novels" (2000 - 2013). He maintains the website, The Haiku of Kobayashi Issa, for which he translated 10,000 of Issa's haiku. He is a past president of the Haiku Society of America. In April 2014, he won a Norman C. Francis Excellence in Scholarship Award.

Melinda Palacio

7 p.m., Monday, April 16, 2018

Melinda Palacio is a 2007 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellow and a 2009 alumnus of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her poetry chapbook, Folsom Lockdown, won Kulupi Press’ Sense of Place cash prize and publication, Spring 2010. Her work has been published in journals and anthologies, including BorderSenses, Buffalo Carp, Black Renaissance Noire, PALABRA: a Magazine of Chicano/Latino Literary Art, Poets and Artists, the Maple Leaf Rag III and IV, La Bloga, Askew Poetry Journal, Latinos in Lotus Land: an Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, Poets of the American West, Strange Cargo, El Tecolote, San Pedro River Review, Pilgrimage Magazine, Quercus Review, Eleven Eleven, the Mas Tequila Review, Hinchas de Poesia, Phati’tude Literary Magazine, 200 New Mexico Poems, the San Diego Poetry Annual, and Southern Poetry Anthology.

Palacio’s first novel, Ocotillo Dreams, (ASU Bilingual Press 2011) is the winner of the Mariposa Award for Best First Book at the 2012 International Latino Book Awards at the Instituto Cervantes in Manhattan and a 2012 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles award for Excellence in Literature. Latino Stories named her a Top Ten New Latino Author of 2012. She is a 2012 Glimmer Train Finalist and received an Honorable Mention in April’s Family Matter 2012 short story contest. Tia Chucha Presspublished her full-length poetry book, How Fire Is a Story, Waiting Fall 2012.

Mary Emma Dutreix Pierson

7 p.m., Monday, April 23, 2018

Mary Emma Dutreix Pierson’s most recent book is New Orleans: City of My Heart. It consists of more than 40 poems composed by Pierson during the past decade. They are personal reflections, vignettes and poems by a life-long native, a love song to the city she loves. Pierson is a poet and retired speech and language pathologist. She holds a doctoral degree in educational assessment and has more than 30 years of teaching experience in the Orleans Parish School System. She obtained a bachelor’s of fine arts degree in performing arts (dance/drama) from Loyola University. Pierson is a weekly reader at the Maple Leaf Bar open mic poetry series and has been a member of the New Orleans Haiku Society since its inception. She has chaired the spring poetry festival of the Louisiana Poetry Society for the past 20 years. 

Louisiana Book News is written by award-winning author Chere Dastugue Coen, who writes romances and mysteries under the pen name of Cherie Claire. Her first book in each series is FREE to download as an ebook, including "A Ghost of a Chance," the first Viola Valentine mystery.