Elizabeth Burk is the author of three previous chapbooks: Learning to Love Louisiana, Louisiana Purchase, and Duet: Poet & Photographer, a collaboration with her photographer husband. Her debut full length book, Unmoored-Poems, was published by Texas Review Press (2024) was arranged loosely in the form of a memoir, Unmoored-Poems has been as “both existentially serious and massively entertaining.” A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems, prose pieces, and reviews have been published in various journals and anthologies including Atlanta Review, Rattle, Southern Poetry Anthology, Louisiana Literature, Passager, Pithead Chapel, Naugatuck River Review One Art, PANK, Mom Egg Review, Valley Voices and elsewhere.

The National Endowment for the Arts honored Michael Doucet, fiddler, composer, and bandleader, as perhaps the single most important figure in the revitalization of Cajun music in the United States.

John Buckelew a fiddle player and singer a Louisiana native and songwriter that learned to play fiddle from James Marvin Choate, whose band The Melody Aces backed rising country stars such as George Jones and Jimmy C. Newman at The Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, LA. He is from Jonesboro, Louisiana and moved to South Louisiana in the late 70’s where he mentored under Cajun Swing fiddler, Hadley J. Castille and often performed with Hadley and his band The Sharecroppers. He is an original member of NSB and also an original member of the all star Lafayette musicians Western Swing ensemble Stop the Clock Cowboy Jazz.

I met Elemore in 1955 while I was a high school student. His aunt lived near us in Abbeville and Elemore visited her frequently. I was working on a project for my industrial arts class, and he helped me design a table with which I won a scholarship to college. Several years later, while studying architecture and working for the architect Neil Nehrbass in Lafayette.

Elmore is acknowledged as the leading contemporary Louisiana landscape painter. The coastal prairie landscape of the rice growing region of southwest Louisiana with its terraced fields, towering thunderheads, solitary oaks, mills and barns is the source of his work. He is known for luminous, gestural paintings which reflect the dramatic skies and vast spaces of the prairies and marshes of south Louisiana. His treatment of light and color is linked to the work of Impressionist and Fauve painters of the 19th century. His paintings often employed shaped panels which are integral to the design and composition of his paintings. Like his photographer father, Elmore was a great photographer as well. We are all missing him today.

Jianqing Zheng’s poetry books include A Way of Looking, The Dog Years of Reeducation, Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Delta Sun, and The Landscape of Mind. His edited books include African American Haiku: Cultural Visions and The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku. He has received three poetry fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission and teaches at Mississippi Valley State University, where he edits Valley Voices: A Literary Review. His latest publications are Still Motion,s coauthored with Leo Touchet, and Delta Lenscapes: Photoku. and Mississippi Delta Photographs. He has also published more than twenty photographic essays including Arkansas Review, Intégrité, Maine Digital Collaborative, Mississippi Folklife, and The Southern Quarterly. A few of his photographs were used on book or magazine covers.

He is the author of How to Drown a Boy (LSU Press, 2024). His chapbooks include The Dissenter's Ground, Lancelot, and Flood, and his poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, McNeese Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Best New Poets 2022, among others. He has received scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow. He currently teaches at Sam Houston State University, where he is Director of Texas Review Press.

Patricia Smith An American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry.[1] She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing[2] and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University and more.

Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. His latest collection is No Brother, This Storm (Mercer University Press, fall 2018). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate from 2017-2019.

Ava Leavell Haymon was the 2013–2015 Poet Laureate of Louisiana. Her most recent poetry collection is Eldest Daughter, published by Louisiana State University Press. She has written three previous collections, Why the House Is Made of Gingerbread, Kitchen Heat, and The Strict Economy of Fire, all also from LSU Press.

He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Until We Talk (Etruscan Press, 2024); Migraré (University of Louisiana Press, 2019); Where I Waited (Self-published, 2016); Megan’s Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie (University of Louisiana Press, 2013); Call and Response: Conversations in Verse (Texas Review Press, 2010), coauthored with Jack B. Bedell; In Ordinary Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Louisiana Press, 2010); From the Other Side: Henriette Delille (Self-published, 2019); and The Blue Boat (University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2004). Bourque served as Louisiana’s poet laureate for two terms from 2007 to 2011.