Delgado Reading Series: Mona Lisa Saloy and Mostofa Sarwar

The Delgado Reading Series is held in Issac Delgado Hall, Building 1, Room: 201E at Delgado Community College’s City Park Campus. Look for signs and commotion on the 2nd floor.

Dr. Mostofa Sarwar is a scientist and a poet. He was the Co-Editor of the book Theory and Practice of Geophysical Data Inversion published by Springer from Germany. Additionally, in 1990 and 1991, he was the Associate Editor for the journal Geophysics. He published several scientific research papers in renowned journals and presented more than 70 invited talks in seminars of universities and professional meetings all over the world. But Sarwar’s heart dwells in the mysterious world of imagination whose ecstatic release is his poems in Bengali, his native language. He published three books of Bengali poems, and his poems, literary critiques, essays, op-editorials, columns appeared in magazines and newspapers including his letters in Time Magazine. He holds an MS in physics and a PhD in geophysics from Indiana University, Bloomington. Currently, he is the Interim Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs & College Provost at Delgado. Previously, he was Associate Provost, Director of Honors, and Professor of Geophysics at UNO.

Mona Lisa Saloy, Ph.D., author & folklorist, educator, and scholar, is an award-winning author of contemporary Black Creole culture in articles, documentaries, and poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina. Currently, Conrad N. Hilton Endowed Professor of English at Dillard University, where she’s raised new voices in verse. Long before the Spoken-Word Revolution, Saloy began as a performing poet and strove to marry the power of performance with the written word. Dr. Saloy first book, Red Beans & Ricely Yours, Poems won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Her book, Second Line Home is a collection of poems that captures day-to-day New Orleans speech, family dynamics, celebrates New Orleans, and gives insight into the unique culture the world loves.

Saloy’s verse has appeared in: The Journal of Pan African Studies; PEN.org; Black Gold, an Anthology of the Best Black Poetry in the Africa and African American World. Fightin’ Words: 25 Years of Provocative Poetry and Proxe from “The Blue-Collar” PEN (Oakland, CA); the www.louisianapoetryproject.org/; Ishmaels Reed’s Konch journal; the anthology Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present; the Faulkner Society’s Double Dealer; Louisiana Cultural Vistas; African American Review, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Ishmael Reed’s Konch, Word Up: Black Poetry of the 80s from the Deep South; Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society’s Double Dealer Redux; Black River Journal, a New Orleans Literary Journal; Testimony, a Journal of African-American Poetry; Five Fingers Poetry; Gambit Weekly; Louisiana Laurels, National Council of Teachers of English in Louisiana; Louisiana Literature; Louisiana English Journal.

Authors & Scholars Catherine Brosman, Violet Bryan, Susan Larson, Olivia Pass, Ishmael Reed have featured her poetry. In San Francisco, Saloy was Poet-in- Residence at the African American Historical & Cultural Society, and a Poet-in-the-Schools in California, Louisiana, and Washington State.

Saloy says she writes for those who don’t or can’t tell Black Creole cultural stories.