Book Banter with Rayna Featuring Brad Richard, Mona Lisa Saloy, Alison Pelegrin & Karisma Price
This episode brings together four acclaimed poets to reflect on the state of the New Orleans and the world of poetry in the years since Hurricane Katrina. We will begin the evening with Brad Richard to discuss the new edition of his collection Motion Studies. Throughout the hour poets Mona Lisa Saloy, Alison Pelegrin and Karisma Price will join the conversation to share their work and insights.
Together, these poets will share work that grapples with memory, loss, survival, and the role of poetry in giving voice to what cannot be forgotten. Through verse and conversation, they will explore how the storm shaped not only their writing, but also the larger story of New Orleans and its communities.
About the Poets
Brad Richard’s most recent book is Turned Earth (Louisiana State University Press, 2025). He is also the author of Habitations (Portals Press, 2000), Motion Studies (The Word Works, 2011), Butcher’s Sugar (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012), Parasite Kingdom (The Word Works, 2019). A second edition of Motion Studies, with additional poems and a foreword by Skye Jackson, was published by The Word Works in March, 2025. His 2022 chapbook, In Place, was chosen for the Robin Becker Series from Seven Kitchens Press. He has taught creative writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, The Willow School (whose creative writing program he founded and directed), Louisiana State University, and Tulane University, and for the Kenyon Review summer workshops. Series editor of the Hilary Tham Capital Collection from The Word Works, he lives, writes, and gardens in New Orleans. More at bradrichard.org.
Mona Lisa Saloy Ph.D, Louisiana Poet Laureate 2021-2023, is author, folklorist, Louisiana Folklife Commissioner, educator, and scholar of Creole culture in articles, documentaries, and poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina, is currently Conrad N. Hilton Endowed Professor of English, Dillard University. Books: Red Beans & Ricely Yours (has a banned poem “The N Word”), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Second Line Home, on New Orleans Black Creole culture. Recent pubs: The Chicago Quarterly Review, Vol 33; “Introduction” to Black Fire!!! This Time II; Southern Voices: fifty contemporary poets, (Tom Mack & Andrew Geyer eds.) Literary Press, Lamar University, Fall 2024. LMNL Poetry Anthology, fall 2024. Black Creole Chronicles: Poems (UNO Press 2023), choice for ONE BOOK ONE NEW ORLEANS 2024, & Book of the Month, The Whitney Plantation Museum. Saloy was named Louisianian of the Year in Literature: 2024 in Louisiana Life Magazine. Mentioned in “Read your way through New Orleans,” by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, NYT Book Review, Oct. 2024.
Alison Pelegrin is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louisiana Board of Regents, the Foundation for Louisiana, and the Academy of American Poets, who awarded her a Poets Laureate Fellowship to support the Lifelines Poetry Project, which supports her work offering poetry workshops in Louisiana Prisons. Alison's two most recent poetry collections are Our Lady of Bewilderment (2022) and Waterlines (2016), both with LSU Press. Alison is Writer-in-Residence at Southeastern Louisiana University, and served as Louisiana Poet Laureate from 2023-2025.
A native New Orleanian, Karisma Price is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. A poet and screenwriter, she is the author of I'm Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023) which was a New York Times Editors' Choice Pick. Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry, Indiana Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, and elsewhere. She is a 2025 Whiting Award Winner in Poetry, a Cave Canem Fellow, a 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review, and was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University.
📚 Purchase these poet's books at BookBanterBooks.com or your favorite indie bookstore.
🎧 Book Banter is a cozy conversation series with authors, illustrators, and other literary creators. Let’s talk books!
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