Poetic Reflections on “Captive State"

In response to the Historic New Orleans Collection's exhibit "Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration," a group of local poets have composed works focused on captivity, freedom, and resistance. They will debut these new poems during a reading commissioned by Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin as part of the Lifelines Poetry Project. Poets include Pelegrin, Kelly Harris-DeBerry, Karisma Price, Christopher Louis Romaguera, Mona Lisa Saloy, Sha’Condria “iCon” Sibley, Stacey Balkun, Gian Francisco Smith, Akeem Olaj, and Jessica Kinnison.

Free and open to the public; donations gratefully accepted. Donations support One Book One New Orleans' year-round community literacy outreach.

The Andre Callioux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice is accessible to community members who require mobility-related ADA accommodations. Parking near the venue is free, though somewhat limited. The nearest RTA stop is at N. Broad and Columbus.

Image credit: Historic New Orleans Collection. Used with permission.

ABOUT THE EXHIBIT

Louisiana’s present-day distinction as the world’s incarceration capital is rooted in three centuries of history. Throughout this history, people in power have used systems of enslavement and incarceration to hold others captive for punishment, control, and exploitation. Black Louisianians have suffered disproportionately under these systems. Through historical objects, textual interpretation, multimedia, and data visualization, Captive State investigates these throughlines and arrives at an irrefutable truth: that the institutions of slavery and mass incarceration are historically linked. Learn more: https://www.hnoc.org/exhibitions/captive-state-louisiana-and-making-mass-incarceration

ABOUT THE LIFELINES POETRY PROJECT

With the Lifelines Poetry Project, Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin brings poetry writing workshops to prisons and community centers, and by doing so emphasizes poetry’s tendency to prod humanity to the surface under any conditions. It is her hope that writing and sharing poems with a common starting point will underscore that people are connected, at the very least, by the gestures they make towards poetry. Learn more: https://lifelinespoetryproject.com/

MEET THE POETS

Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter & co-editor of Fiolet & Wing. Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest, her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Pleiades, & several other anthologies & journals. Stacey holds a PhD from University of Mississippi, Oxford and an MFA from Fresno State. She lives and writes in New Orleans.

Kelly Harris-DeBerry is an award-winning poet and the author of Freedom Knows My Name and the chapbook, Home Girl. Her poems have been published in various publications, including Yale University's Caduceus Journal, Southern Voices, and more. In 2022, one of her poems was translated and displayed in Germany. She is known not only for her poetry but also for the ways she experiments with sound, music, and delivery to bend language. Kelly is always trying something new on the page or on the mic. Kelly, a nationally respected arts consultant, supports various festivals, conferences, and organizations. Kelly has worked for Poets & Writers Inc. and served as a guest poetry editor for Bayou Magazine. Kelly was selected to the first cohort of the Random House Pathways to Publishing Fellowship program. Currently, she is completing her tenure on the national literary committee for a project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Smithsonian.

Jessica Kinnison's work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Phoebe, and The Southern Humanities Review, among other publications. She holds an MFA from Chatham University in Pittsburgh where she taught creative writing in the Allegheny County J*il as part of the Words Without Walls program. A 2018 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow, she has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was listed among “Eight New Orleans Poets to Watch” in POETS & WRITERS in April 2020. A Mississippi native, she is co-founder of the New Orleans Writers Workshop. She’s currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript entitled “Ways to Die in Mississippi.”

Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Foundation for Louisiana, and the Academy of American Poets, who awarded her a Poets Laureate Fellowship to support the Lifelines Poetry Project, which bring poetry workshops to Louisiana Prisons and Communities. The New Orleans Poetry Festival is her community partner in that work. Alison’s two most recent poetry collections are Our Lady of Bewilderment (2022) and Waterlines (2016), both with LSU Press. Alison is Writer-in-Residence at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Karisma Price s an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. A poet and screenwriter, she is the author of I'm Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023) which was 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 Cave Canem Fellow, was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and is the 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University.

Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was born in Hialeah, Florida, and graduated from Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He has an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. Romaguera has been published in Passages North, Catapult, Massachusetts Review, Islandia Journal, Latino Book Review and other publications. He is a monthly columnist at The Ploughshares Blog and was the Poetry Editor at Peauxdunque Review. He is a VONA alum. Romaguera was a 2023 Periplus Fellow. His translation of the novel, Charras, will be published next year by UNO Press. He is currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript describing the trips he has taken to Cuba, where his father was born.

Mona Lisa Saloy, Ph.D. Louisiana Poet Laureate 2021-2023, is author, folklorist, Louisiana Folklife Commissioner, educator, and scholar of Creole culture in articles, documentaries, and poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina; 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. Black Creole Chronicles: Poems (UNO Press 2023), choice for ONE BOOK ONE NEW ORLEANS 2024, & Book of the Month, The Whitney Plantation Museum. Mona Lisa Saloy writes for those who don’t or can’t tell Black Creole cultural stories.

Among many things, SHA'CONDRIA (“iCon”) SIBLEY is an Alexandria, Louisiana native and longtime New Orleans-based poet, writer, and multi-inspired healing artist, whose work spans across page, stage, canvas, music, talk radio, and short film. Sha’Condria shares art as a healing and liberation tool in many spaces, including inside prisons, juvenile detention centers, and schools. She has toured the college circuit nationally and has worked for over a decade (and counting) creating, organizing, and hosting arts-driven, community-centered events. A legendary multiple-time national poetry slam champion and multiple-time viral spoken word artist, she has appeared on TV One's Verses and Flow, has performed on Essence Music Festival mainstage, and her work has been featured on many worldwide platforms including Huffington Post, For Harriet, Teen Vogue, and BBC World Radio. She is also featured on multiple recording projects alongside Grammy Award winning artists. Sha’Condria is the author of My Name Is Pronounced Holy: A Collection of Poems, Prayers, Rememberings, and Reclamations.

In 2006 Gian Francisco Smith, a lifelong New Orleans resident, returned home from his Katrina displacement inspired and motivated to help preserve the culture of his beloved city. A focus on spoken word proved to highlight Smith’s talents as well as pay homage to the griots before him that cultivated the oral traditions of Bulbancha. In 2008 Gian co-founded “Pass It On” open mic. It is currently the longest running open mic in the city of New Orleans and served as host venue for the three time national slam champion Team SNO. In 2011 Gian appeared in three promotional trailers and one episode of the HBO series Treme. The overwhelming response to his original poetry, highlighted by his piece “O’ Beautiful Storm”, led to an interview on National Public Radio’s weekend Edition featuring a performance of his poem “You Betta Ask Somebody”. In the years to follow Gian’s work has graced many platforms from stages like Snug Harbor and various outdoor festivals, to inclusion in nationally distributed school textbooks and Louisiana literary magazine 64 Parishes. Additionally he has been awarded many writing commissions; two of which include Tulane University for the poem “That is the Question”, and the NBA New Orleans Pelicans which commissioned three works including his New Orleans Black history poem “For the Culture” Also an award winning filmmaker, Gian serves as festival director of the Black Film Festival of New Orleans which he founded in 2018.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice, 2541 Bayou Road, New Orleans, United States