Black Creole Chronicles

Who are Black Creoles? Saloy’s new poems address ancestral connections to contemporary life, traditions celebrated, New Orleans Black life today, Louisiana Black life today, enduring and surviving hurricanes, romance, #BlackLivesMatter, #wematter, as well as poems of the pandemic lockdown from New Orleans. Saloy’s new collection of verse advances and updates narratives of Black life to now, including day-to-day Black speech, the lives of culture keepers, and family tales. These poems detail cultural and historical memory of enslavement not taught and offer healing and hope for tomorrow.

Mona Lisa Saloy, author, folklorist, educator, and scholar, is an award-winning author of contemporary Creole culture in poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina. As a folklorist, Saloy documents sidewalk songs, jump-rope rhymes, and clap-hand games to discuss the importance of play. As a poet, her first book, Red Beans & Ricely Yours, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. She’s written on the significance of the Black Beat poets, on the African American Toasting Tradition, on Black & Creole talk, on conditions and keeping Creole after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Her work captures the day-to-day New Orleans speech, contemplates family dynamics, celebrates New Orleans, and all in a way everyday people can enjoy.