On Sunday, March 26th, Baton Rouge Gallery’s Sundays@4 series is honored to welcome poets John Warner Smith and Charles DeGravelles back to the gallery for a reading of their recent works. As with all Sundays@4 performances, this will be free and open to the public.
John Warner Smith
Charles DeGravelles
John Warner Smith was the Poet Laureate of Louisiana from 2019 to 2021 and is the only African American man to serve in the office in its eighty-year history. Smith has published five collections of poetry, most recently Our Shut Eyes (MadHat Press, 2021). His poems are widely published in literary journals across the country.
Smith’s novella, For All Those Men: When the KKK Threatened to Take Control of Louisiana, was published by UL Press in November 2022. A Cave Canem Fellow, Smith is also a 2020 Poets Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets and is the winner of the 2019 Linda Hodge Bromberg Literary Award. Smith earned his MFA at the University of New Orleans.
Charles N. DeGravelles’ poetry and fiction have been widely published in literary journals such as the Southern Review, Ohio Review, and Literary Quarterly, and in anthologies such as Wide Awake in the Pelican State: Stories by Contemporary Louisiana Writers, and Uncommon Place, an Anthology of Louisiana Poets. His first book of poems, The Well Governed Son, was published by the New Orleans Poetry Journal Press. His biography, Billy Cannon: A Long, Long Run (LSU Press), won the Louisiana Library Association’s Literary Award for best book of 2015. A new volume of poems, Parking for Paradise Only will be published this year. He lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.