The flagship poetry event of the year here in New Orleans, the 2024 New Orleans Poetry Festival is just a few weeks away. With a full weekend of readings, panels, workshops, and more, featuring presenters from around the city, around the state, and indeed, around the world — this year’s festival has a guest lineup of poets from South Korea — for area poets and poetry lovers there’s nowhere else to be.

I’ll be participating in two events; one, a reading with our international poets in Baton Rouge on Tuesday, April 16, and moderating the Bagley Wright Lecture in Poetics given this year by poet Julian Talamantez Brolaski, speaking on “Towards an Epistemology of Rhyme.” Attendance at the festival is free, and all details and the current schedule are available at nolapoetry.com.

I’m honored to be visiting the English Department at Belhaven University next week, offering a workshop to their creative writing students and giving a craft lecture on the relationships between literary genres. Very grateful to the faculty for having me in, especially for the opportunity to teach out of the new Mid/South Sonnets anthology from Belle Point Press.

I’m delighted to be moderating a panel at this year’s Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival, held from March 20-24. The subject of the panel will be writers who have edited, translated, or otherwise stewarded other writers’ works to publication, as a form of literary citizenship or service to the profession. Representing Kendall Daigle’s posthumous poetry collection A Soul Under Construction, I’ll be speaking alongside Kayla Min Andrews, Ariel Francisco, and Gina Ferrara — and could not be more excited.

More details, schedule, and registration information at the TWF website.

March and April are book festival season in New Orleans; among the many (!) on offer over the next two months is the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane, which runs from March 14-16. More details here.

I could not be more thrilled to read alongside luminaries Dylan Krieger, Rodrigo Toscano, and Carolyn Hembree on Friday, March 8, at Bar Redux in New Orleans, hosted by lmnl lit. Each poet has a new or recent collection out — much to celebrate. The reading starts at 8 — all welcome.