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Malaika Favorite

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2025 Malaika Favorite

Malaika Favorite is a visual artist and writer whose publications include Dreaming at the Manor and Illuminated Manuscript. She won the 2015 Broadside Lotus Press Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award for Ascension. Her poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. Favorite also won the 2022 April Gloaming Publishing, Moon Meridian Novella Award for her novella: The Author Project, published in January 2024.

Schedule

11:15 am to Noon
Outside Museum, West Tent
Hurricanes Katrina & Rita at 20: An Anthology of Louisiana Poetry with Art
Featuring contributors Malaika Favorite, J. Bruce Fuller, Merrill Guillory, Patrice Melnick, Benjamin Morris, Michelle (M.A.) Nicholson, Valentine Pierce, Karisma Price, and Brad Richard, with editors Mona Lisa Saloy and John Warner Smith

12:15 pm to 1:00 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

2:00 pm to 3:00 pm
State Library, Fifth Floor, Serials
Fiction After the End: Building, Surviving, and Seeing the World Anew
Eiren Caffall, All the Water in the World: A Novel
Malaika Favorite, After Color
Joshua Wheeler, The High Heaven: A Novel
with moderator Serena Puang

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

After Color

“It’s like living in a black-and-white photo that keeps fading in the sun. Only we’re fading with it.” —After Color

From celebrated artist Malaika Favorite, winner of the Cosmographia Books Prize for Spiritual Fiction, comes a mesmerizing story told in luminous prose that makes readers feel the wonder—and terror—of seeing color in a colorless world.

In 2020, humanity lost the ability to see color. Over the next thirty years, society rebuilt itself in shades of gray.

But on an autumn morning in Atlanta, 2052, fifteen-year-old Jade Kelly perceives the impossible: a single red leaf drifting through a gray stream.

As her world fills with colors no one else can see, Jade must decide: Will she stay silent to protect herself? Or expose herself—and her gift—to a world that may never understand.

After Color asks what it means to be visibly, undeniably different in a world that demands sameness—and whether the courage to remain true to yourself can light the way for others to see.

Hurricanes Katrina & Rita at 20: An Anthology of Louisiana Poetry with Art

The year 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Two esteemed, award-winning former Poet Laureates of Louisiana, one a native of New Orleans, Mona Lisa Saloy, and the other a native of Lake Charles, John Warner Smith, worked together to commemorate those historic events by creating a forum for published and emerging poets as well as nine artists of Louisiana to share art and poems of their experiences, feelings, and reflections of Katrina and Rita as seen through their eyes and the lives that the disasters impacted.

"Hurricanes, Katrina and Rita at 20 is jazz funeral second line through and through. The poems rise like white handkerchiefs of hope waving over the heads and hearts of witnesses who know grief and loss and terror and how to dance the dance of passing through. Kudos to Saloy and Smith for bringing us these songs of rupture and repair."--Darrell Bourque, Louisiana Poet Laureate, 2007-2011

"If you’ve lived through them, storms like Katrina and Rita draw a hard line in your history, like BC and AD, between the before and the after times. For some, the in-between time before life regains normalcy takes hours, for some whole decades, and each moment on that hard line has countless voices. Those voices are exactly what Hurricanes Katrina and Rita at 20 brings to light. Curated by two of the most accomplished poets Louisiana has produced, Poet Laureates Mona Lisa Saloy and John Warner Smith, and filled with some of the Gulf South’s finest voices, this anthology takes us from the levees to the backwaters, into cities and beyond, chronicling pain and loss and spirit and hope through all the voices that helped us push through that hard line into our future."--Jack B. Bedell, author of Ghost Forest, Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019