LSU’s Delta Mouth Reading Series Presents Two Celebrated Louisiana Authors

BATON ROUGE – LSU Creative Writing’s Delta Mouth Reading Series will bring to campus two acclaimed authors with deep roots in Louisiana – Mona Lisa Saloy, the current Poet Laureate of Louisiana, and the novelist and poet Olivia Clare Friedman. Both authors will read and discuss their work. 

The event will be held on Feb. 10 at 6:00 p.m. on the LSU campus in the Grand Salon of the French House. It is free and open to the public.

“I think the event will be of great interest to LSU and the larger Baton Rouge community,” said LSU Department of English Professor Zack Godshall. “Both Dr. Saloy and Ms. Friedman write poems and stories that explore and celebrate the fragility and resiliency in South Louisiana's culture and environment.”

The Feb. 10 event is the second installment of the newly formed Delta Mouth Reading Series, an extension of the student-run Delta Mouth Literary Festival, which will be held April 21-23. The series’ first event was held in October and featured New Orleans author E.M. Tran and Dr. James Nguyen H. Spencer, vice provost and dean of the LSU Graduate School.

The event is co-sponsored by LSU’s Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, and African and African American Studies program.

 

About the authors

Mona Lisa Saloy, Ph.D.,is the current Poet Laureate of Louisiana and an award-winning author, folklorist, educator, and scholar. Much of her work celebrates New Orleans Black Creole culture. Her first book of poetry, “Red Beans and Ricely Yours,” won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Her second book, “Second Line Home,” captures the solemn grief, ongoing struggle and joyous processions of New Orleans after the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina. Dr. Saloy holds both a Ph.D. in Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing from LSU, and she currently lives in her hometown, New Orleans, where she is the Conrad N. Hilton Endowed Professor of English at Dillard University. 

 

 

 

 

 

Olivia Clare Friedman is the author of the highly praised novel, “Here Lies” (Grove Atlantic, March 2022), a visceral and portentous look at mourning, memory, and motherhood in a future Louisiana ravaged by climate change. Friedman is also the author of the book of short stories, “Disasters in the First World,” and a book of poems. Raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she teaches Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she holds the title of Nina Bell Suggs Endowed Professor.