General Session with Dr. Mona Saloy, Ph.D, Louisiana Poet Laureate

Mona Lisa Saloy, Ph.D.

Louisiana Poet Laureate

Mona Lisa Saloy, Ph.D., Louisiana Poet Laureate (2021-23) is an award-winning author & folklorist, educator, and scholar of Creole culture in articles, documentaries, and poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina. Currently, Conrad N. Hilton Endowed Professor of English at Dillard University, Dr. Saloy documented Creole culture in sidewalk songs, jump-rope rhymes, and clap-hand games to discuss the importance of play. She writes on the significance of the Black Beat poets–especially Bob Kaufman, on the African American Toasting Tradition, Black talk, and on keeping Creole to today. Books: Red Beans & Ricely Yours, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award; Second Line Home, captures New Orleans speech, family dynamics, celebrates New Orleans, the unique culture the world loves. Saloy’s screenplay for the documentary Easter Rock premiered in Paris, the Ethnograph Film Festival & at the national Black museum. She’s lectured on Black Creole Culture at Poets House-NYC; the Smithsonian; Purdue University; the University of Washington; and Woodland Patterns Book Center, and on Black Beats at the Sorbonne & the New York Museum of Art. Her documentary, Bleu Orleans, is on Black Creole Culture. She is an editorial reviewer for Meridians: Feminism, race, transnationalism. See her recently published verse in I am New Orleans, anthology. University of New Orleans Press, 2021; in the Chicago Quarterly Review, Vol. 33, Anthology of Black American Literature, and Obsidian journal (Fall 2022); in Black FIRE!!! This Time Anthology, 2022; and in Tribes journal NYC, April 2022; & featured in Persimmon journal 2023. Her newest collection: Black Creole Chronicles: Poems (University of New Orleans Press) 2023. Mona Lisa Saloy writes for those who don’t or can’t tell Black Creole cultural stories. www.monalisasaloy.com Tweet to @redbeansista