On Sunday, November 2nd, 2025, join us as we host a reading and sharing event by many of the poets and artists who experienced Hurricanes Katrina & Rita. They have come together to contribute to a new anthology, Hurricanes Katrina & Rita at 20, an Anthology of Poetry and Art (Black Bayou Press, New Orleans), and share their creative work, reflecting, remembering, and healing our hearts.
As with all Sundays@4 presentations, this will be free and open to the public.
about the anthology:
Black Bayou Press
“The year 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Two esteemed, award-winning former Poet Laureates of Louisiana, one a native to New Orleans, Mona Lisa Saloy, and the other a native to 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.”
ABOUT THE Poets:
Charles DeGravelles
Charles deGravelles’ poetry and fiction have been published in literary journals such as the Southern Review, Louisiana Literature, Ohio Review, and Literary Quarterly, and in anthologies such as Wide Awake in the Pelican State: Stories by Contemporary Louisiana Writers, and Uncommon Place, an Anthology of Contemporary Louisiana Poets (both LSU Press). His book of poems, The Well Governed Son, was published by the New Orleans Poetry Journal Press. His biography, Billy Cannon: A Long, Long Run (LSU Press), won the Louisiana Library Association’s Literary Award for best book of 2015. He has three poems appearing in the upcoming anthology, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita at 20. He is currently on the board of the Louisiana Poetry Society. He is a deacon in the Episcopal Church and Archdeacon of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana.
Nicole Eiden
Nicole Eiden is a New Orleans-based poet and screenwriter. She is the winner of the 2023 LMNL Poetry Broadside Contest for her poem "The Bridge." In 2021, her poem "Embodiment" was selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as a co-runner-up in the Words and Music Writing Contest. Her poem "Mortgage" appeared in New Poetry from the Midwest (New American Press, 2019) and earned third place in the 2016 Women’s National Book Association Writing Contest. Kirkus Reviews featured her debut poetry collection, I Am One of You (Mississippi Sound Publishing, 2016), in their Indie category. Nicole’s films have won honors, including a CINE Golden Eagle Award
Malaika Favorite
Malaika Favorite is a visual artist and writer, her publications include: Dreaming at the Manor, Finishing Line Press 2014, Illuminated Manuscript, published by New Orleans Poetry Journal Press, 1991. Malaika won the 2015 Broadside Lotus Press Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award for, Ascension published in 2016. In 2019 Malaika won the Cosmographia Books prize for Spiritual Fiction for her novel, After Color; publication 2025. Malaika won the 2023 April Gloaming Publishing, Moon Meridian Novella Award for her novella: The Author Project published in January 2024
Mark Folse
Mark Folse is a poet but wrote extensively on his post-Katrina/Federal Flood blogs. He will spend the first years of retirement in the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop MFA program. His poetry has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, and Peauxdunque Review. His prose has been anthologized in What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, and A Howling in the Wires.
Carolyn Hembree
Carolyn Hembree is the author of three poetry collections: For Today (LSU Press, 2024), runner-up for the Poetry by the Sea Book Award and finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award; Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague (Trio House Press, 2016), winner of the Trio Award and the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award; and Skinny (Kore Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, and other publications. She received a 2016-2017 ATLAS grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents and has also received grants and fellowships from PEN, New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Southern Arts Federation. She was awarded the university’s 2017 Excellence in Teaching Award. Carolyn serves as editor-in-chief and poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.
Benjamin Morris
A native of Mississippi, Benjamin Morris is the author of two prior books of poetry and one book of nonfiction, Hattiesburg, Mississippi: A History of the Hub City (Arcadia, 2014). His work has appeared in The Oxford American, Lithub, and The Southern Review, and received fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission and Tulane University. His next book, a full-length collection of poetry entitled The Singing River, is forthcoming from Belle Point Press in 2025. He lives in New Orleans.
Michelle (M.A.) Nicholson
Michelle (M.A.) Nicholson is a New Orleans poet, editor, educator, and arts organizer. Her work appears in Best New Poets 2022, New Orleans Review, Diode, Trampoline, Peauxdunque Review, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from the University of New Orleans, was Associate Poetry Editor for Bayou Magazine, won the 2021 Andrea-Saunders Gereighty Academy of American Poets Award, and was Kenyon Review’s 2024 Peter Taylor Fellow. Her debut collection, Around the Gate (Word Works, 2024), was selected by Carolyne Wright for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Connect with M.A. at michellenicholsonpoetry.com.
Valentine Pierce
Valentine Pierce, spoken word artist and graphic designer was the June 2006 Writer-in-Residence at A Studio in the Woods. Her creative and journalistic writing has been published throughout the U.S. She has been featured on cable television and radio stations, including WWNO’s The Reading Life.”She co-hosted Rhythm & Muse open mic, Berkeley Museum, hosted WRBH’s Writers’ Forum, produced shows, including It’s Personal, for which she received a NOJHF grant. In its review of From a Bend in the
River, which included Pierce’s, “Rivers of My Soul,” the Times-Picayune called her a stalwart of the New Orleans poetry scene. The poem was choreographed by Newcomb College for Women’s dance department for the inauguration of Tulane University’s president. Recent publications: New Orleans Poetry Journal. Books: Up Decatur: Second Edition, 2023; debut poetry book, Geometry of the Heart, 2007. Presentations include New Orleans Words & Music 2023 and the 2024 Louisiana Book Festival.
Karisma Price
Karisma Price is the author of I’m Always So Serious ( Sarabande Books, 2023), which has 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, 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 Barbra M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation. She holds a MFA in poetry from BYU and is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University.
Brad Richard
Brad Richard is a poet and teacher living in New Orleans. He is the author of five collections of poems: Turned Earth (LSU Press, 2025), Parasite Kingdom (The Word Works, 2019 – winner of the 2018 Tenth Gate Prize), Butcher’s Sugar (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012), Motion Studies (The Word Works, 2011 – winner of the 2010 Washington Prize, finalist for the 2011 Thom Gunn Award), and Habitations (Portals Press, 2000). The poems here originally appeared in Motion Studies, which The Word Works is reissuing in 2025 with additional poems, an afterword by the poet, and a foreword by poet Skye Jackson.
Mona Lisa Saloy
Mona Lisa Saloy, Ph.D. Louisiana Poet Laureate 2021-2023, is an 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. Most recently featured on CBS Sunday Morning!. Currently, with former LA Poet Laureate John Warner Smith, Saloy is the editor of Hurricanes Katrina & Rita at 20, an anthology of Poetry with Art, BLACK BAYOU PRESS, 2025. Mona Lisa Saloy writes for those who don’t or can’t tell Black Creole cultural stories. www.monalisasaloy.com
Andy Young
Andy Young's second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, was published in October by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014) and four chapbooks. She grew up in southern West Virginia and has lived most of her adult life in New Orleans, where she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared in Greensboro Review and Michigan Quarterly Review, and her poetry film Pharmacy Museum Tour Guide, New Orleans Andy Young won the Berlin Indie Film Award, the Ottawa Film Award, will soon be featured in the New Orleans Film Festival, the Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Award and many others. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her work has been translated into several languages. andyyoung.org, @andyyoungpoet
Sundays@4 is presented in partnership with the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area whose mission is to enhance the identity of our unique American landscape by preserving and promoting our heritage and by fostering progress for local champions that create authentic, powerful connections between people, culture, and the environment.