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Catharine Savage Brosman

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2025 Catharine Savage Brosman
© Joseph Warner

© Joseph Warner

Catharine Savage Brosman, professor emerita of French at Tulane University, is known internationally for her 18 volumes on French literature, four on American literature, and 15 collections of poetry (six at LSU Press). Additionally, she has published three collections of informal essays, a volume of short fiction titled An Aesthetic Education and Other Stories, and, most recently, Partial Memoirs. She divides her time between Houston, Texas, and New Orleans, Louisiana, her favorite city.

Schedule

9:00 am to 10:00 am
Outside Museum, West Tent
The Louisiana Poet Laureate Presents Louisiana Poets, Volume 1
Ralph Adamo, All Fall Down: Poems 2020-2024
Catharine Savage Brosman, Metates and Other Poems
Elizabeth Burk, Unmoored: Poems
David Middleton, Time Will Tell: Collected Poems
Brad Richard, Turned Earth: Poems and Motion Studies: Second Edition
Ed Ruzicka, In the Wind: Poems
with Gina Ferrara

10:15 am to 11:00 am
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

1:15 pm to 2:00 pm 
A.Z. Young Park, Author Tent A
The Art of Remembrance: Literary Memoirs on the Shaping of Identity
Catharine Savage Brosman, Partial Memoirs
Gavin Cologne-Brookes, Portraits from Paris: School and Travel Remembered from the City of Light
with moderator Tracy Carr

2:15 pm to 3:00 pm 
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

Metates and Other Poems

Metates is a book of poetic landscapes from Virginia and Florida westward to west Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and Hawaii. Urban settings similarly have their place, with examples from Paris and New Orleans. More broadly, the book is about what is given to us in the way of scenes, circumstances, and bodies, and our connections to all that. Landscapes and other settings are not inert; they are what we attempt to make of them. Metates is, therefore, about us and our responses to what we encounter.

From the opening poem, with its motif of the oracle, to the final sonnets, concerning fortune and chance, destiny makes itself felt. While it enables us, offering opportunities, it imposes boundaries. Though, like the metates (grinding stones) that facilitated pre-Columbian life, destiny may weigh on us in its inescapability; the stones are evidence of life's dependencies.

Partial Memoirs

CATHARINE SAVAGE BROSMAN, one of America’s most accomplished and inspired poets, is a writer of extraordinary awareness. Partial Memoirs features moments, images, and experiences that exemplify her life, seamlessly intertwined with literature. Unlike many intellectuals, she is not suspicious of nostalgic memory, comparing a recollection with one of Proust’s that shows how memory is mediated by sensory experience. The style is unique, combining scintillating precision with poetic charisma. Here we have a new gem in the crown of American letters. — Jonathan Chaves, Professor of Chinese at the George Washington University and author of the poetry collection Surfing The Torrent

Catharine Savage Brosman’s Partial Memoirs, composed when she was nearly ninety, reflects on experiences that have helped make up her poetry and prose. She looks her life squarely in the eye, including the trials, prejudices, and hardships along with happy times and successes. Examining her neuroses as well as her giftedness, she has created a candid depiction of a hard-working twenty-first century writer, flawed but truly talented.
—Olivia McNeely Pass, Professor, Nicholls State University, retired, co-author of Louisiana Poets: A Literary Guide

Catharine Savage Brosman, one of America’s finest poets, is also a literary historian and critic of French and American literature and fiction writer. Here, she focuses her attention on the persons and places that shaped her character and work: her mother, her father (who inspired her love of high culture), two divorced husbands (one of whom she remarried), and selected friends. Running throughout is a warm and infectious gratitude for the faces and places that have made her.
—Donald W. Livingston, Professor of Philosophy, Emory University and Past Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburg