New Louisiana Poet Laureate, Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy, Looks to Use Platform to "Give Hope in Verse"
Style Magazine Newswire | 8/27/2021, 11:04 a.m.
Mona Lisa Saloy
An English professor and folklorist at Dillard University in New Orleans will become Louisiana’s poet laureate.
“It is such an honor to represent my home state. It is something I never thought would happen,” Mona Lisa Saloy said in an interview Tuesday, after Gov. John Bel Edwards and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities announced her appointment. She succeeds John Warner Smith, who was on the endowment's nominating panel.
“Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy beautifully captures the culture and essence of Louisiana in her mesmerizing poetry,” Edwards said in a news release. “She understands the importance of using art to preserve our stories and pass them down for generations."
Saloy has taught at Dillard since 1991, working in the city where she grew up.
Her students have included Jericho Brown, who won last year's Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
“He would laugh. He would pen me what he thought was trash but I could see the gems. I hope I encouraged him to believe in his creativity,” Saloy said. “And he took off. He was going to be a lawyer. I asked him, 'What are you going to do with this gift?' It was unmistakable and moving."
She wrote about some of what she found after the hurricane in the opening of the poem “New Orleans, a Neighborhood Nation:”
“I'll be encouraging people to tell their stories in verse. Especially our unique cultures. We have so many,” she said. “I want our state to revere our ancestors and reveal those nuances."
”Hopefully I'll engage people with loving poetry — Louisiana culture’s loving words."
