On April 1, poets from the anthology I Am New Orleans, published last September by the University of New Orleans Press, kicked off the 2021 New Orleans Poetry Festival with a reading. Edited by Kalamu ya Salaam, the anthology includes thirty-six poets who revisit and celebrate Marcus B. Christian’s definitive poem of the same name.

The event was broadcast live from Café Istanbul, a popular event space in the city for music and poetry, and poets beamed in from their homes to share their work. There was a limited in-person audience and many watching virtually. For a lot of writers who hadn’t seen each other since before the pandemic, the reading served as a virtual reunion. There were shout-outs and “hey, how you doing?” messages filling up the chat.

The reading featured editor Kalamu ya Salaam along with poets Kristina Kay Robinson, Akilah Toney, Michael “Quess” Moore, Skye Jackson, Jahi Salaam, Chuck Perkins, and Frederick “Hollywood” Delahoussaye. I was also honored to take part as a reader and enjoyed this celebratory event, a launch to both the festival and to National Poetry Month.

See the entire New Orleans Poetry Festival schedule for more virtual events throughout the month of April. 

Watch the I Am New Orleans reading here:

Amy Gerstler’s book of poems Index of Women, published last week by Penguin Books, depicts experiences of womanhood through a number of forms and perspectives, including a dramatic monologue from an aging opera singer, an ode to a head of lettuce, and prose poems recounting personal memories. The second poem in the collection, “Virginity,” builds an atmosphere around the experience of having sex for the first time, without ever naming the act itself. Through subtle details that hark back to adolescence—“passing notes rather than speaking” and “reading secret magazines a cousin stuffed / into the bottom of his sleeping bag”—Gerstler avoids cliché and develops the speaker’s voice using the oft-mythologized moment of losing one’s virginity, offering instead a sense of the speaker’s life that isn’t defined by sex. Write a series of scenes that study a character experiencing a key life moment without ever explicitly naming the experience itself. What is revealed or emphasized by gesturing to details that surround the experience?