© Azalea Photography

Patrice Melnick is the director of the Opelousas Museum. Her publications include a poetry chapbook, The City of Hey Baby, published by Finishing Line Press, and a memoir, Po-boy Contraband: from Diagnosis Back to Life, published by Catalyst Press. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and lives in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, with her loving and patient husband, Olan.

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

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

The year 2025 marks the 20^th 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