On Sunday, August 15th, Baton Rouge Gallery’s Sundays@4 series is honored to welcome Darrell Bourque, for a special reading of poems in collaboration with a visual artist, Bill Gingles. He will also be talking about using traditional poetic forms with contemporary themes.
As with all Sundays@4 presentations, this event is free and open for all to enjoy.
Darrell Bourque.
Photo courtesy of Phillip Gould
Darrell Bourque is professor emeritus in English from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, a former Louisiana Poet Laureate, the recipient of the Writer Award 2014 from the Louisiana Book Festival, and the recipient of the James Rivers Award from the Center for Louisiana Studies, ULL, for his contributions to Louisiana Literature and Culture.
At ULL he served as the director of the freshman English program, the director of the Deep South Writers Conference, the director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program, director of the Creative Writing Program and the Head of the English Department.
He is the recipient of both the ULL Foundation’s Distinguished Professor Award and the Outstanding Teacher Award. He was president of the National Association of Humanities Education and served as the editor of its journal, Interdisciplinary Humanities. He is one of the founding members of Narrative 4, an international story exchange which works for community building and social justice issues through storytelling around the themes of violence, faith, environment, identity, and immigration.
He is on the Advisory Board of Festival of Words of Grand Coteau, an organization founded to bring literacy and literature to under-served and underprivileged communities. He is also on the Advisory Board of NUNU Cultural Arts Collective in Arnaudville and on the Board of the Ernest J. Gaines Center at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is also a presenter in the programs for the retired Jesuits at their retirement center in Grand Coteau.
His 10 poetry publications include his first book Plainsongs (poems set in the Marais Bouleur) and his later works, Megan’s Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie (poems in the voices of the historical figures of the two largest Cajun migrations into Louisiana), “if you abandon me, comment je vas faire, An Amédé Ardoin Songbook,” and Where I Waited (poems in the voices of four pioneer figures in early Louisiana traditional music). He is the co-founder of the Améde Ardoin Project (with Patricia Cravins), a social justice project to create a public commemorative for the iconic traditional Louisiana Creole musician. His latest work, From the Other Side, is a series of sonnets on the founder of the Holy Family Sisters, Henriette Delille, keyed to abstract expressionist paintings of NSU graduate and Byrd High School art teacher Bill Gingles.