For those in the New Orleans area, the YMCA’s annual 5k for adult literacy is this weekend, Sunday, November 17, starting at 8.30am in City Park. Registration is available from now until race day morning — hope to see you there to support a fantastic cause.

The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South is sponsoring a day conference at Tulane this Friday, November 15th, called “After Katrina: Transnational Perspectives on the Futures of the Gulf South.” The conference is free and open to the public; details, registration, and a list of participants are available here. From the conference website:

This one-day conference, hosted by Tulane’s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, is part of a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, entitled ‘After Katrina: Projecting racial, transnational and environmental futures beyond the American Century’. This project is run by Anna Hartnell from Birkbeck, University of London, who is a visiting scholar at Tulane in autumn 2013, and whose research is attempting to locate post-Katrina New Orleans within larger national and international debates about the changing status of the United States in the twenty-first century. The conference seeks to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars – working across the arts, cultural studies, geography, environmental studies, architecture, law, etc. – and artists, activists and organizers in New Orleans and the region, to explore the ways in which global perspectives on Katrina might open up new ways of envisaging the futures of the Gulf South.

 

 

I’m delighted to say that the Young Writers Workshop at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, originally scheduled for September but postponed due to Tropical Storm Karen, will be taking place this coming weekend instead on November 9th. Running from 9am-4pm at WAMA in Ocean Springs, this workshop is open to all writers of any experience level at the high school and college level who are interested in writing about the arts. We’ll be working with poetry, fiction, and short nonfiction inspired by Anderson’s work, and we’ll have a student reading at the end of the day.

More information and signup details are available at the WAMA website or by calling the Museum at 228-872-3164.

The Louisiana Book Festival is tomorrow, November 2nd, in Baton Rouge — if you’re within spitting or even shouting distance, go. It is a blast.

Pelican Bomb, newly redesigned, has a short review of the “Process” exhibition currently on view at the Antenna Gallery — well worth a visit.