Join the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities in welcoming Louisiana’s newest poet laureate, Alison Pelegrin. As Louisiana’s literary ambassador for two years, the poet laureate travels the state encouraging fellow Louisianans to explore and engage with poetry, supporting Louisiana’s vibrant and thriving poetry scene. Pelegrin, a renowned poet and writer-in-residence at Southeastern Louisiana University, will present her inaugural reading October 4 at The Helis Foundation John Scott Center, from 6 to 8 p.m. Admission is free, and doors will open at 5 p.m.
Octavia Books will be on site with books available for purchase and to be signed by Allisn Pelegrin as a reception following the reading.
Alison Pelegrin is the author of Our Lady of Bewilderment (LSU Press 2022), as well as Waterlines (LSU Press 2016), Hurricane Party (U Akron 2011) and Big Muddy River of Stars (U Akron 2007), winner of the 2006 Akron Poetry Prize. Her chapbook Our Lady of the Flood won the Diode 2018 Chapbook Prize and an Eric Hoffer Award. She is the recipient of a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and and ATLAS Grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents. Pelegrin is writer-in-residence at Southeastern Louisiana University, and her work has appeared in Bennington Review, The Southern Review, Ninth Letter, and as printable broadsides at Broadsided.
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Whether by way of visitations from secular saints, hauntings from childhood, or back talk from "indelicate broads," a complicated world speaks to and through Alison Pelegrin in Our Lady of Bewilderment. An unusual blend of mystic-comedian, Pelegrin explores physical and psychic beauty and terror without losing sight of wonder.
In Waterlines, Louisiana native Alison Pelegrin gives us poems that describe the terrible power of nature even as they underscore the state's beauty. The poet moves from the familiar gaudy delights of life in New Orleans to immerse the reader in the vastly different experience of living north of Lake Pontchartrain.
