of Hurricane Katrina
August 29, 2010
The Pirate's Alley Faulkner Faulkner Society will observe the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with a reception on Sunday, August 29 at Faulkner House, 624 Pirate's Alley, located just off Jackson Square facing St. Louis Cathedral's garden.The event, featuring food, beverages, and music, is free to the public with advance reservations to Faulkhouse@aol.com or (504) 524-2940. The program will include readings by well known authors.
Among featured authors scheduled is renowned New Orleans-born poet Nicole Cooley, who will read from her new collection of poetry inspired by Katrina, Breach. Nicole, daughter of poet Peter Cooley, director of Creative Wirting at Tulane University, also will appear on a program of poetry later that afternoon with her father at Tulane. Nicole judged the Poetry Category of the 2010 William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition and will participate as a member of the faculty for Words & Music, 2010, which will take place November 17-21.
The program also will feature Ellis Anderson, whose new book Under Surge, Under Siege: The Odyssey of Bay St. Louis and Katrina, was published by the University of Mississippi Press in this month, and Katheryn Krotzer Laborde, author of the new non-fiction book: Do Not Open: The Discarded Refrigerators of Post-Katrina New Orleans.Excerpts from Fleeing Katrina by Rob Florence will be
presented by actors under Rob's direction.
Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans. In 2010, she has published two books of poetry, Breach, published by LSU Press, which focuses on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, and Milk Dress, co-winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award, to appear with Alice James Books in November. She has published two other books of poems and a novel. She has been awarded the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a "Discovery"/Nation Award, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. She directs the new MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College-City University of New York. Ms. Cooley will be speaking first at 2:30 p. m.
Ellis Anderson, a designer, musician and civic activist, grew up in Charlotte, NC, then migrated to New Orleans in pursuit of her artistic muse. She resided in the French Quarter for two decades before moving full time to the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1996.Writing has remained her primary passion and Anderson’s work has been published in various regional venues, including Southern Cultures. Her essays have garnered several awards, including first place runner-up in the 2006 Faulkner/Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. She was also the recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Fellowship for Literary Excellence (2007). Her book Under Surge, Under Siege: The Odyssey of Bay St. Louis and Katrina, details her eye-witness account of Katrina’s fury and three years of the storm’s aftermath in her close-knit community. Ms.
Anderson is to receive the Eudora Welty Prize for this work at the Eudora Welty Symposium hosted by the Mississippi Women's University in October.
Ms. Anderson will speak at approximately 3 p. m.
Rob Florence will present excerpts from Fleeing Katrina after Ellis appears.
Katheryn Laborde, a professor of English at Xavier University, is both a fiction and non-fiction writer. She is a finalist in the 2010 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition in the novella category. Winners and runners-up of the competition will be announced on William Faulkner's birthday, September 25. Her new non-fiction book, Do Not Open, is an extensive treatise on what came to be the lasting visual and olefactory symbol of what happened to New Orleans in Katrina...her discarded refrigerators filled with rotting food. The book is a collector's item, filled with numerous photographs of the "iceboxes" without ice and her commentary. Ms. Laborde will be the final speaker.
| Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society 624 Pirate’s Alley, New Orleans, LA 70116 phone: (504) 586-1609 or (504) 525-5615 fax: (504) 522-9725 info@wordsandmusic.org |
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