Darrell Bourque is Professor Emeritus in English and Interdisciplinary Humanities from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.  His poetry books are Plainsongs (1994, Cross-Cultural Communications, Merrick NY), The Doors between Us (1997, Inaugural Issue of Chapbook Series, Louisiana Literature Press, Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond LA), Burnt Water Suite (1999, Wings Press, Austin TX), The Blue Boat (2004, Inaugural Issue of Louisiana Writers Series, Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette LA); Call and Response: Conversations in Verse, with Jack B. Bedell, (2009, Texas Review Press, Huntsville TX - A member of the Texas A&M Press Consortium), and In Ordinary Light, New and Selected Poems (2010, University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, Lafayette, LA).  In 2009 he directed the Imagining Lincoln: Louisiana Poetry Project as part of Louisiana and the nation’s observance of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial.  Holding the Notes, a chapbook commissioned by Chicory Bloom Press, will be published in 2011.
He was named poet laureate of Louisiana by Governor Kathleen Blanco in 2007 and was reappointed to the position in 2009 by Governor Bobby Jindal.

 

Joe Butts and The Hat and Beard Trio

The Hat and Beard Trio is made up of  Josef Butts, Bernard Pearce and Zach Rhea. Hat and Beard plays improvisational music drawn on a variety of musical styles and genres. The Hat and Beard trio pays respect to the jazz tradition by not paying too much respect to the jazz tradition. They defy standard instrumental roles to produce music that is fresh, spontaneous and ranges from tuneful and swinging melodies, lush ambient background textures and angular, dissonant passages, often within a few moments.  The Hat and Beard Trio draws the listener into an alternate musical reality where time is suspended and anything is possible.

A Louisiana native, Dr. Josef Butts currently resides in Lafayette, Louisiana and is currently employed as a teacher for Lafayette Parish School system's Talented Arts Program and as the double bass instructor for the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra Conservatory of Music. He received a Bachelor’s degree from The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, a Master’s from The University of New Orleans and the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from The University of Texas at Austin.  He has played throughout the United States and shared the stage with a diverse list of artists including Chris Potter, Kat Edmonson, Kevin Lovejoy, Donald Harrison, Ed Peterson, Bruce Saunders, Harold Batiste, Butch Miles, Jeff Albert, Don Vappie, Clive Wilson and Wendell Brunious. Previously, Josef  served as an assistant instructor at The University of Texas at Austin, as the adjunct professor of double bass at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and taught music in the New Orleans and St.Landry Parish school systems.

Trumpeter and composer Bernard Pearce has recorded two collections of original music and is working on a third. He has performed throughout the Unites States and has garnered critical acclaim for his live performances and recorded works.

Zach Rhea plays drum set and other assorted instruments.  He is currently studying jazz performance at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

 

Desireé Dallagiacomo is a Teaching Artist, Mentor-Writer at WordPlay Teen Writing Project in Baton Rouge.

Desireé Dallagiacomo is a native of Chico, CA and one of the most electrifying new performers on the Baton Rouge spoken word poetry scene. Desiree originally began her work teaching poetry to middle school youth in 2009 as a member of City Year. Through her impressive work as a budding teaching artist and volunteer, she was personally recruited by WordPlay founder, Anna West, to join the WordPlay team. In fall of 2010 Desiree officially became a teaching artist with WordPlay as well as a photography instructor/mentor with Big Buddy’s Teen 360 after-school program for high school students.

 

Toi Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan, in 1941. Her books of poetry are Tender (1997), winner of the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize; Captivity (1989); Natural Birth (1983); and The Empress of the Death House (1978). Her The Black Notebooks, a literary memoir (W.W. Norton, 1997), won the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her essay, "Beginning Dialogues," is included in The Best American Essays 2006, edited by Lauren Slater. Her honors include the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; two Pushcart Prizes; the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists; the New York Graduate School of Arts & Science Alumni Achievement Award; the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, Inc.; the Elizabeth Kray Award for service to the field of poetry from Poets House; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Maryland State Arts Council. With Cornelius Eady, in 1996, she co-founded Cave Canem Foundation, North America’s premier “home for black poetry.” She is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Barb Johnson is the UNO Artist in Residence, Fiction. Johnson worked as a carpenter in New Orleans for more than twenty years before receiving her MFA from the University of New Orleans in 2008. She has won Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers and Washington Square’s fiction competition. Her fiction has appeared in such magazines as Glimmer Train; Washington Square; The Greensboro Review; 52 Stories; Guernica; and Oxford American. Her nonfiction can be found in a number of anthologies, most recently in Voices Rising II: Stories from the Katrina Narrative Project; 2011 Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market; and Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Jobs They Quit.

Her debut collection of short stories, More of This World or Maybe Another (HarperPerennial, 2009) was an IndieNext pick; a Discover Great New Writers selection; and a finalist (2nd place) for the 2010 Barnes & Nobel Discover Award. In 2011, it won the American Library Association’s Barbara Gittings Literature Award.

Johnson is the recipient of a two-year grant from A Room of Her Own Foundation, which will support the writing of her first novel.
Latasha Weatherspoon, a native of Ville Platte, Louisiana, is a mentor, educator, and poet. She has also served as a mentor writer for WordPlay as well as a Community Mentor for Project Rise. She was on the Baton Rouge slam teams for 2005 through 2009. Currently, she is acting Slam Master for Baton Rouge.

She just graduated in the class of 2011 with a Masters of Science • Speech, Language & Hearing Science from Southern University.

 

Timothy Seibles (Poetry) is an Assistant Professor of English at Old Dominion University. Seibles is the author of five books of poetry: Body Moves, Hurdy-Gurdy, Kerosene, Ten Miles an Hour, and Hammerlock. An NEA Fellow in 1990, he recently received the Open Voice Award from the National Writers Voice Project. Tim was born in Philadelphia in 1955. He left there in 1973 to attend Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he earned a BA in English in 1977. He remained in Dallas to teach high school English for ten years. In 1988, Tim began his M.F.A. work at Vermont College, receiving his degree in 1990. In 1991, he won a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. For two years after that, Tim was the Writing Coordinator of the Work Center. Before beginning to teach at Old Dominion, he spent a year living and writing in Cambridge. Recently his work has been featured in Red Brick Review, New Letters, Dark Eros, Ploughshares, New England Review, The Artful Dodge, and in E. Ethelbert Miller's anthology In Search of Color Everywhere.

 

Latasha Weatherspoon, a native of Ville Platte, Louisiana, is a mentor, educator, and poet. She has also served as a mentor writer for WordPlay as well as a Community Mentor for Project Rise. She was on the Baton Rouge slam teams for 2005 through 2009. Currently, she is acting Slam Master for Baton Rouge.

She just graduated in the class of 2011 with a Masters of Science • Speech, Language & Hearing Science from Southern University.