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Louisiana
Poet Laureate to Visit
Before Hurricane
Katrina struck New Orleans, Brenda Marie Osbey, the Poet Laureate
of Louisiana, was serving on the faculty of the city’s
Dillard University as artist-in-residence, conducting seminars
and colloquia in literature, creative writing and New Orleans
Black culture.
Since then, Osbey
has taken a visiting assistant professorship in English at
Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge while Dillard is
closed for repairs of Katrina’s destruction.
Osbey will visit
Smith to give a poetry reading, “Onward: New Orleans,”
on Thursday, December 1, at 7 p.m. in Stoddard Auditorium;
and a seminar on the Black Culture of New Orleans on Friday,
December 2, at 4 p.m. in Neilson Browsing Room (tea will be
served).
A native of New
Orleans, Osbey is the author of All Saints: New and Selected
Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1997), which
received the 1998 American Book Award. Her other works include
Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman (1991), In
These Houses (1988) and Ceremony for Minneconjoux
(1985).
Among Osbey’s
awards and honors are the Camargo Foundation Fellowship (Cassis,
France, 2004), the Louisiana Division of the Arts Creative
Writing Fellowship (1994), the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage
Foundation Maxi-Grant (1993), and the National Endowment for
the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship (1990). She has been
a fellow of the MacDowell Colony; the Fine Arts Work Center
in Provincetown; the Kentucky Foundation for Women; the Virginia
Center for the Creative Arts; the Millay Colony and the Bunting
Institute of Radcliffe College, Harvard University.
Osbey’s
visit is sponsored by the women’s studies department
and by Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism,
a feminist, interdisciplinary journal based at Smith and published
by Indiana University Press.
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