Louisiana Poet Laureate to Read Poetry at Louisiana Tech University

As part of Academic Excellence Week at Louisiana Tech University, Dr. Julie Kane, the current Louisiana Poet Laureate, will read her poetry on March 27 at 7 p.m. in George T. Madison Hall 105 Auditorium. Her reading is sponsored by the Louisiana Tech University Department of English with support from the George E. Pankey Eminent Scholar Chair in English. The reading is open to the public at no charge. On March 28, courtesy of the North Central Louisiana Arts Council, Dr. Kane will also read her poetry for Ruston High School English classes. 

Kane’s poetry collections are Jazz Funeral (Story Line Press, 2009), which won the Donald Justice Poetry Prize; Rhythm & Booze (University of Illinois Press, 2003), Maxine Kumin’s selection for the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the Poets’ Prize; and Body and Soul (Pirogue, 1987). She is also the co-editor, with Grace Bauer, of Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical and Creative Responses to Everette Maddox (Xavier Review Press, 2006), which was a finalist for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance book prize in poetry; and the associate editor for 20th-century poetry of Voices of the American South, the Longman anthology of Southern literature (2005). With Kiem Do, she co-authored the nonfiction Vietnam memoir Counterpart: A South Vietnamese Naval Officer’s War (Naval Institute Press, 1998), which became a History Book Club Featured Alternate Selection.

Her poetry has been published in The Southern Review, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Mademoiselle Magazine, and Feminist Studies, and in more than thirty anthologies including Penguin’s Poetry: A Pocket Anthology, the Everyman’s Library collection titled Villanelles, and The Book of Irish American Poets from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. They have also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Her essays on poetry and literature have appeared in Twentieth Century Literature, Modern Language Quarterly, PsyArt, Journal of Consciousness Studies, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, and many other journals and reference volumes. 

A former George Bennett Fellow in Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy, New Orleans Writer in Residence at Tulane University, and Fulbright Scholar to Vilnius Pedagogical University (Lithuania), Dr. Kane is a Professor of English at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches.