The Poetry Buffet with Darrell Bourque and Julie Kane

The Poetry Buffet will host Darrell Bourque and Julie Kane on Saturday, October 1, at 2 p.m. at the Latter Library (5120 St. Charles).

Darrell Bourque grew up in a rural community near Sunset, Louisiana. He graduated from USL and then received a master’s and a Ph.D. in creative writing from Florida State University. He is Professor Emeritus in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he served as director of the Creative Writing and Interdisciplinary Humanities programs. He was appointed Louisiana Poet Laureate by then-Governor Kathleen Blanco in 2007 and reappointed by Governor Bobby Jindal in 2009. His personal initiative for the laureateship is to develop poetry audiences by teaching and reading in the pre?college classroom as well as in the state’s libraries. He has been instrumental in the creation of the Louisiana Poetry Project.

Julie Kane was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but has lived in her adopted state of Louisiana for over thirty years now.  She was selected to be Louisiana’s Poet Laureate in 2011. One of Anne Sexton’s graduate poetry students at Boston University at the time of Sexton’s suicide in 1974, Kane moved to Louisiana in 1976.  She lived in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and St. Gabriel. Since 1999 she has lived in Natchitoches, where she teaches at Northwestern State University.