On Sunday, June 25th, Baton Rouge Gallery’s Sundays@4 series is honored to welcome Louisiana’s Poet Laureate since 2021, Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy.
This event is the latest installment in what has become a BRG tradition of bringing our state’s Poet Laureates to the gallery to present their recent work and to talk about their time serving in this role.
As with all Sundays@4 performances, this will be free and open to the public.
Mona Lisa Saloy, Ph.D. is an author, folklorist, educator, and scholar of Creole culture in articles, documentaries, and poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina, currently, Conrad N. Hilton Endowed Professor of English at Dillard University. Her first book, Red Beans & Ricely Yours, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Her second, Second Line Home, celebrates New Orleans Black Creole culture.
Recent publications include the Chicago Quarterly Review, Vol. 33, Anthology of Black American Literature HBCU Rising issue; Obsidian Journal 2022, in the national anthology Black Fire This Time !!! and Persimmon Journal, 2023.
Saloy’s latest collection, Black Creole Chronicles: Poems, is now available from University of New Orleans Press. The collection’s 128 pages contain poemes that “detail cultural and historical memory of enslavement not taught and offer healing and hope for tomorrow.”
Funding for this program has been provided by the State of Louisiana and administered by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.
