Fifteen Years of the Poetry Buffet

 Melinda Palacio    

Poet Gina Ferrara of New Orleans has been running the Poetry Buffet at the Latter Library in New Orleans for fifteen years. I've been fortunate to participate in the reading since it started. The poetry series meets every first Saturday of the month. This month's offering, due to the lingering pandemic, will be on zoom. If you are in the mood for an early poetic feast, find your time zone and zoom in, 2pm Central and noon PST. I'm a little under the weather, but thanks to zoom, I will deliver my fifteen minutes like the pro I am. I will join our hostess, who will read, along with Julie Kane and Andy Young. 

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86283753394...

The Poetry Buffet Poets for March 2022, Saturday, March 4 at 2pm central, noon pacific

Gina Ferrara lives and writes in New Orleans. She has four poetry collections including her most recent Weight of the Ripened (Dos Madres Press, 2020), a finalist for the Eyelands Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Callaloo, The Poetry Ireland Review and Tar River Poetry and was selected for publication in the Sixty-Four Best Poets of 2019 by Black Mountain Press. Since 2007, she has curated The Poetry Buffet, a monthly reading series in New Orleans. She teaches English and writing at Delgado Community College Julie Kane’s most recent poetry collection is Mothers of Ireland (LSU Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry by the Sea Book Award and a longlist finalist for the Julie Suk Book Prize. Previous collections include Rhythm & Booze, a National Poetry Series winner, and Jazz Funeral, winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. With Grace Bauer, she co-edited Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Her poems appear in more than sixty anthologies including Best American Poetry and The Book of Irish American Poets from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. She has served as a Fulbright Scholar, Louisiana State Poet Laureate, Poets’ Prize Committee Chair, National Book Award in Poetry juror, and George Bennett Fellow in Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy. Professor Emerita of English at Northwestern State University of Louisiana, she currently teaches in the low-residency poetry MFA program at Western Colorado University. Melinda Palacio is a poet, author, and speaker. She lives in Santa Barbara and New Orleans. Her poetry chapbook, Folsom Lockdown, won Kulupi Press’ Sense of Place 2009 award . She is the author of the novel, Ocotillo Dreams (ASU Bilingual Press 2011), for which she received the Mariposa Award for Best First Book at the 2012 International Latino Book Awards and a 2012 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. Her first full-length poetry collection, How Fire Is a Story, Waiting, (Tia Chucha Press 2012) was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Award, the Paterson Prize, and received First Prize in Poetry at the 2013 International Latino Book Awards. In 2015, her work was featured on the Academy of American Poets, Poem-a-Day Program. Melinda's latest poetry collection is Bird Forgiveness. Andy Young's second full-collection, Museum of the Soon Departed, was chosen for the inaugural Patricia Spears Jones Award and will be published by Camperdown NYC next year. She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014) and four chapbooks. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Southern Review, Pank, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Cortland Review. Her poems have also been featured in contemporary and flamenco dance productions.