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A Reading with Karisma Price
March 14 • 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Join us Tuesday, March 14th at 6 pm to celebrate Karisma Price’s poetry book, I’m Always So Serious!
She will be in conversation with Christopher Romaguera.
This event is free to attend.
Karisma Price’s stunning debut collection is an extended meditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and New York City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a cultural reckoning of past and present. James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr, a phone “Autocorrects ‘Nigga’ to Night’,” If Beale Street Could Talk is recast with characters from The Odyssey. In these pages there is grief, there is absence, there is violence—“We know that mostly everything around us / is measured in blood.”—but there is also immense love and truth. Karisma Price has created a serious masterpiece, a book “so dark you have no other option but to call it / precious.”
Karisma Price is a poet, screenwriter, media artist, and author of I’m Always so Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023). Her work has appeared in Oxford American, Poetry, Four Way Review, wildness, Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, was a finalist for the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize, and was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation. She is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and holds an MFA in poetry from New York University where she was a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow. She is currently an assistant professor of poetry at Tulane University.
Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was born in Hialeah, Florida and graduated from Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He has an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) at the University of New Orleans. Romaguera has been published in Passages North, PANK Magazine, Louisiana Literature, Catapult, Massachusetts Review and other publications. He is a monthly columnist at The Ploughshares Blog and is the Poetry Editor at Peauxdunque Review. Romaguera is a VONA alum. He is a 2023 Periplus Fellow.