[Baton Rouge]

Delta Mouth Literary Festival: Corina Copp and others
March 14, 2015, 7:30 pm
at The Walls Project Art & Design Center

Join the final night of the 7th annual Delta Mouth Literary Festival, on the ground floor of the Chase Tower. Corina Copp is a writer and theater artist based in New York. She is the author of the chapbooks ALL STOCK MUST GO (Shit Valley Verlag, Cambridge, UK), Miracle Mare (Trafficker Press), and Pro Magenta/Be Met (Ugly Duckling Presse), among others. Recent work can be found in Cabinet, BOMB, Boston Review, Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing Conceptualism (Triple Canopy), SFMOMA’s Open Space, and elsewhere. She is developing a three-part play entitled The Whole Tragedy of the Inability to Love, inspired by the successive forms of the work of Marguerite Duras. She is a curator at the Segue Foundation and a 2014 NYFA Fellow in Poetry. Her first book, The Green Ray, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse this spring. Maurice Ruffin is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of New Orleans. He has recently won two short story awards: the 2014 Iowa Review fiction award (for “The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You”) and the 2014 Short Fiction Contest at So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art! (for “The Anchor Song”). His novel-in-progress, All of the Lights, won the gold medal for that category in the 2014 William Faulkner-William Wisdom writing competition, and an excerpt will appear in an upcoming issue of Callaloo. His writing has also appeared in The Knicknackery, Writing Tomorrow, Redivider Journal, 94 Creations, The Apalachee Review, Regarding Arts & Letters, and the University of New Orleans’s Ellipsis. Mona Lisa Saloy is an author, folklorist, educator, and scholar. An award-winning author of contemporary Creole culture in poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina, Saloy documents sidewalk songs, jump-rope rhymes, and clap-hand games to discuss the importance of play. Her first book of poems, Red Beans & Ricely Yours, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and tied for a third. Her new book, Second Line Home, is a refreshing collection of poems that captures the day-to-day New Orleans speech, contemplates family dynamics, and celebrates New Orleans—all in a way everyday people can enjoy. Desiree Dallagiacomo is a student at the University of New Orleans where she studies creative writing and women & gender. In October of 2014, She ranked 3rd at the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, the recipient of UNO’s Ryan Chigazola Poetry Scholarship, and, as a member of Slam New Orleans, ranked 3rd in the nation at the 2014 National Poetry Slam. She is a teaching artist for Forward Arts, The Recovery School District, and The Centre for the Arts. Her work has been featured in Everyday Feminism, The Huffington Post, Upworthy, in Tulane University’s production of The Vagina Monologues, the New Orleans Fringe Festival, Tandem Review, and Words Dance Literary Magazine. Buddy Wakefield is a three-time world champion spoken word artist featured on the BBC, ABC Radio National, HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, NPR and most recently signed to Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records. In both 2004 and 2005, he won the Individual World Poetry Slam Finals thanks to the support of anthropologist and producer Norman Lear, and successfully defended that title at the International Poetry Festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands against the national champions of seven European countries with works translated into Dutch.  An author at Write Bloody Publishing, a queer activist, and an original Board of Directors member with Youth Speaks Seattle, Buddy is published internationally in dozens of books with work used to win multiple national collegiate debate and forensics competitions. Wakefield, who is not concerned with what poetry is or is not, delivers raw, rounded, disarming performances of humor and heart.   Find more event information here.