All the talk around town is of the Tennessee Williams Festival next week, one of the highlights of the city’s literary calendar each year. On Saturday afternoon, the 24th, I’m honored to sit on a panel with Ava Leavell Haymon, Alison Pelegrin, and Julie Kane, moderated by Darrell Bourque (the latter two participants being the current, and former, Poets Laureate of Louisiana), and can’t wait to hear more of their wonderful work.
Perhaps most intriguing, however, is what’s happening the night before — the Lafcadio Hearn Late Night Revue organized by the People Say Project, a cabaret-style event at the New Orleans Healing Center that certainly promises to be one of the more eclectic events of the festival. Hearn, a prolific writer and journalist based in New Orleans in the late 1800s, is perhaps best known as the author of the famous quote that “…it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio,” an observation that rings as true today as it did over a century ago. More details about the event are available here.
benjamin morris 