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"This is our opportunity and our calling -- and it's our duty -- to get it right.
We can rebuild the Gulf Coast in a manner
that lifts people up and gives them a voice. We can reduce and even eradicate poverty in the nation, and reclaim our moral
standing in the world. Other nations still desperately want to look to us for moral guidance and leadership, and we cannot
fail again.
Brenda Marie Osbey, the Poet Laureate of Louisiana... . paid homage to her great city, its people,
and their hope for rebuilding it, in these eloquent words:
'Believe on those hands
and they will see you through seasons
of drought and flood
believe on these hands
and you will cross the grandy-water
journey with me and see what I see... .' "
– Senator Edward M. Kennedy on restoring New Orleans –
from the 2005 RFK Human Rights Award presentation to ACORN New Orleans organizer Stephen Bradberry.
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LA Laureate Responds:
To
many people, home is simply the most recent place they've worked or lived. These are the people who wonder why we bother living
there. New Orleanians have ties that go back many generations. My own family goes back to slavery and freedom there. And there
is no way I will not return on the first possible date.
Read more
After the Storm: readings, lectures and semimars in response to the floods of 2005
New Orleans author named Louisiana's poet laureate
In
Spring 2005, New Orleans author Brenda Marie Osbey was appointed poet laureate of the State of Louisiana and
served in that capacity through Fall 2007. Osbey was the first Louisiana laureate to be selected by a committee of peers.
A
graduate of Dillard University and the University of Kentucky, she also studied at the Université Paul Valéry at Montpellier,
France.
Osbey, whose literary career spans three decades, is the recipient of numerous literary honors and awards.
Her ALL SAINTS: New & Selected Poems (LSU Press) received the American Book Award and is now in its third printing. In Spring 2004, she was writer-in-residence
at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. An author of poetry and prose nonfiction, studies of her work appear in such
volumes as:
The Oxford Companion
to African American Literature (Oxford, 1997);
Forms of Expansion:
Recent Long Poems by Women by
Lynn Keller
(U.
Chicago Press, 1997); and
The Future of Southern Letters edited by Jefferson Humphries and
John Lowe (Oxford, 1996).
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