Biography

A native New Orleanian of Filipino descent, Randy Gonzales is a poet, writer, and community historian who researches and shares the stories of Filipino Louisiana. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he holds the Dr. James Wilson/BORSF Eminent Scholar Endowed Professorship in Southern Studies. You can find out more about Filipino Louisiana at FilipiNOLA.com and more about Gonzales at RandyGonzales.com.

Schedule

2:00 pm to 3:00 pm
State Library, Fifth Floor, Capitol View Room
The Louisiana Poet Laureate Presents Louisiana Poets, Part 2
with Jack B. Bedell, Randy Gonzales, Biljana Obradović, Karisma Price, Dave Smith, and Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin

3:15 pm to 4:00 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

Settling St. Malo: Poems

Settling St. Malo brings readers back to a time when Louisiana had the largest Filipino population in the United States—when Filipinos fished out of St. Malo, dried shrimp on Barataria Bay, and designed Mardi Gras floats in New Orleans. Poet Randy Gonzales explores the history of Louisiana’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Filipino communities and his family’s story of migration and assimilation through a blend of documentary and lyrical poetry. Settling St. Malo is a history of Filipino Louisiana in verse and an ode to the struggles of our immigrant ancestors, a collection of poems whose substance, language, and rhythms are informed by oral histories, diaries, letters, and government documents—poems infused with cultural and visual landscapes and driven by a poet’s desire to account for a lost heritage.