Gov. Kathleen Blanco is searching for the next state poet laureate to replace outgoing laureate Brenda Marie Osbey. Blanco designated the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities to moderate the selection process. The LEH is a nonprofit organization that promotes humanities education in Louisiana. Michael Startisky, LEH president and executive director, said the LEH has five nominations so far and will also consider the top-five prospects from last year’s poet laureate search. The deadline to apply is Dec. 8. Osbey, English professor at LSU, has taught at Dillard, Loyola and Tulane universities and the University of California, Los Angeles. Several states have poet laureates whose duty is to give one public reading or lecture each year. Osbey lectured at the Louisiana Book Festival and at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Startisky said Osbey has been ideal as the first poet laureate for the state. “She is a consummate professional and possesses an inexhaustible passion for her craft,” he said. “Despite her dislocation by Katrina, she has appeared around the country reading her poetry and as an advocate for her native New Orleans.” Osbey spent the first year of her tenure giving lectures all over the nation about New Orleans’ history, culture and the city’s post-Katrina situation. “Mondays and Wednesdays I taught my classes at LSU, and then every Thursday through Sunday I traveled to a different city, state, university or cultural center reading and talking about our culture, heritage and the significance of our region to the nation and world,” Osbey said. “It was an exhausting schedule but truly rewarding work.” Startisky said he asked Blanco if Osbey’s two-year term could be extended because of her dislocation, but the request was dismissed. Osbey, New Orleans native, is the author of several books including “Desperate Circumstances, Dangerous Woman” and “Ceremony For Minneconjoux.” “Like many writers, I suppose, my favorite [work] is usually my current project,” she said. “Perhaps that’s because the ideas for it are fresh, present, palpable.” Osbey’s most recent project is a series of poems focused on the floods caused by Hurricane Katrina. She said the series is not finished, and the working title is “Death By Water Suite.” “It’s a difficult piece to talk about because for those of us from New Orleans, the experience of the floods is still quite raw,” she said. “Friends and acquaintances, people I admire, nearly everyone I know suffered major losses.” Osbey said most of her close friends relocated after Katrina, and one committed suicide. “Others are ailing and perhaps dying. And bodies are still being discovered in the city’s Ninth Ward,” she said. “Meanwhile, elsewhere in the nation, people assume that our lives have gone back to normal. But we are grieving – a whole city still grieving and trying to rebuild our lives. Many people may indeed never return. It truly and deeply hurts.”
—–Contact Angelle Barbazon at [email protected]