Main Menu NEWS RELEASE
Contact: David West (west@nsula.edu
)
News Bureau
Northwestern State University
Natchitoches, LA 71497
(318) 357-6466
10/30/2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NATCHITOCHES-Northwestern State University faculty members Dr. Lisa Abney and Dr. Suzanne Disheroon Green will be among the regionally and nationally acclaimed authors taking part in the first Louisiana Book Festival on Saturday, Nov. 2. The celebration will be held from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the State Capitol and the State Library of Louisiana in downtown Baton Rouge. The free, daylong event, sponsored by the State Library and the Louisiana Library Foundation, is open to the public.
Abney and Green are associate professors of English at Northwestern. Abney is also director of the Louisiana Folklife Center at NSU.
"The Louisiana Book Festival is an exciting and important event to the state," said Abney. "I am delighted to have been invited. The literature of Louisiana is so interesting and diverse. As a writer about writers, it will be interesting to hear some of the people I have written about discuss their influences."
The Northwestern faculty members will moderate a discussion on "The New Generation of Louisiana Writers" and will also talk about their book, "Songs of the New South: Writing Contemporary Louisiana," published by Greenwood Press.
The book is a volume of critical essays on contemporary Louisiana fiction writers. It includes three sections, "Louisiana Narratives and Folk Traditions," "Paganism, Popism, Protestantism and the New Southern Religion" and "Three Castes of Race and Gender." Scholars from throughout the United States contributed essays.
In addition to essays on James Lee Burke, Ernest Gaines and Rebecca Wells, scholars examine work by Robert Olen Butler, Robert Penn Warren and Anne Rice as well as two political autobiographies by Huey Long.
"Given the focus of my work on Louisiana, it is an honor to participate and get to meet many of these people," said Green. "It will be very enlightening to get insights from some of these authors that you don't get from just reading."
Burke, Gaines, Rick Bragg, Shirley Ann Grau, Andrei Codrescu and David Halberstam are among the many distinguished authors who will present readings and discussions in the House and Senate Chambers and committee rooms at the State Capitol. Participating children's authors include Patricia Austin, Sharon Arms Doucet, Coleen Cole Salley, Whitney Stewart and Fatima Shaik.