Presentation on Creole History

Meet Mona Lisa Saloy, Author & Folklorist, Educator, and Scholar.  An award-winning author of contemporary Creole culture in poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina. As a poet, her first book, Red Beans & Ricely Yours, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and tied for a third. She’s written on the significance of the Black Beat poets, on the African American Toasting Tradition, on Black & Creole talk, on conditions and keeping Creole after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Saloy’s new collection of verse “black creole chronicles” advances and updates narratives of Black life to now, including day-to-day Black speech, the lives of culture keepers, and family tales. These poems detail cultural and historical memory of enslavement not taught and offer healing and hope for tomorrow.