Anthologies

Hurricanes Katrina & Rita: An Anthology of Louisiana Poetry & Art

Featured Poetry: “Not Whether But When the River Rises” and “Graduation Song for My Katrina Baby”

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

Winter in America (Again

Featured Poetry: “In Ogden, I Can Do Me”

“Poets from the United States and beyond respond to the 2024 Presidential election. The poems are rooted in a belief that the incoming administration will not relieve or heal us from our nation’s past: the destruction of the environment, the unbridled use of power, the pervasive narrative that Black lives do not matter, patriarchy, reproductive injustice for women, silent support for the US prison-industrial complex, and the lack of compassion for diverse gender identity, immigrants, the indigenous, and unsheltered populations.”

~ Carbonated Press

Best New Poets 2022

Featured Poetry: “Dandies, Wilde”

“Entering its eighteenth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country’s top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it is being practiced today.”

~ University of Virginia Press