Brenda Marie Osbey, who is to receive an honorary Doctor of Letters degree at Commencement, was appointed the Poet Laureate of the State of Louisiana in the spring of 2005. She is a native of New Orleans who received her Bachelor's degree from Dillard University and her Masters degree from the University of Kentucky.

Osbey may be most well-known for authoring All Saints: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1997), for which she received the American Book Award in 1998. She has written numerous poems which have appeared in various publications, and her essays on New Orleans have appeared in publications such as The American Voice and Creative Nonfiction.

She spent a year as the visiting writer-in-residence at Tulane University. She went on to teach courses at Loyola University, UCLA and Dillard, where she taught both French and English.

                                                  Read the Citation here.