New Orleans Poets on the Airwaves: Laura Mullen and Bill Lavender

Written by David Benedetto

As well as WRBH’s Poetry contest (which you can read about here!), we will also be spotlight several local poets during the month of April on our Midday Poetry program. Starting this Wednesday at 12:30PM (with a replay on Sunday at 6AM), listen in to hear some of the best New Orleans has to offer. After the episode airs, it will be uploaded onto WRBH’s Soundcloud page. Here’s what’s up for our final week: 

• Bill Lavender
  • Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, editor and teacher living in New Orleans. He founded Lavender Ink, a small press devoted mainly to poetry, in 1995, and he founded Diálogos, an imprint devoted to cross-cultural literatures (mostly in translation) in 2011. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in dozens of print and web journals and anthologies, with theoretical writings appearing in Contemporary Literature and Poetics Today, among others. His most recent book of poetry, the ground-breaking verse memoir, Memory Wing, dubbed by Rodger Kamentetz “a contemporary autobiographical masterpiece,” was published by Black Widow in 2011. His novel, Q, a neo-picaresque view of a world in constant economic crisis, appeared from Trembling Pillow in 2013.

• Laura Mullen
  
  • Laura Mullen is the McElveen Professor in English at Lousiana State University. She is the author of seven books. Prizes for her poetry include Ironwood‘s Stanford Prize, and she has been awarded two Board of Regents ATLAS grants, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. She has had several MacDowell Fellowships and is a frequent visitor at the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Her work has been widely anthologized in collections from Norton. Omnidawn, and CoffeeHouse and her poems have been set to music by composers Jason Eckardt and Nathan Davis. She is the Director of the Creative Writing program at LSU and her latest book is entitled COMPLICATED GRIEF.

To listen to last week’s program featuring Jerika Marchan and Cassie Pruyn, or previous weeks featuring poets of Team Slam New Orleans 2016, Mona Lisa Saloy and Peter Cooley, our featured poets from last year or the winners from our first annual poetry contest, check them out on our Soundcloud page below!