Submitted by: Michael Blanchard, mblanchard@uca.edu on 03/18/2025
The 2024-2025 UCA Visiting Poet Series will conclude April 22 with a public reading and book signing by current Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin at 7 p.m. in the McCastlain Art Lecture Hall on the UCA campus. The series is jointly sponsored by the School of Language & Literature and SLANT, the School’s international journal of contemporary poetry.
Alison Pelegrin was appointed Poet Laureate of Louisiana in 2023. She is also Writer-in-Residence at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, where she has taught for more than twenty years. A native of Gretna, located just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, Pelegrin has lived in Louisiana her entire life, except for a period of three years in Fayetteville while working towards an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas.
She is the author of six books of poetry, including her most recent collection, Our Lady of Bewilderment (Louisiana State University Press, 2022), and her poems have also appeared in notable literary journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, and The Bennington Review. In addition, she has received multiple notable fellowships and grants, including a fellowship from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an ATLAS Grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents, and in 2024 an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.
The reading is open to the public and is free of charge. For more information, contact SLANT editor Michael Blanchard at mblanchard@uca.edu.
