Hannah Chalew and Bill Lavender

Hannah Chalew is an artist raised and currently working in New Orleans. She received her BA from Brandeis University in 2009 and her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016. Chalew has exhibited widely around New Orleans and has shown around the country at Popps Packing, Hamtramck, MI, Dieu Donné, New York, NY; Asheville Museum of Art, Asheville, NC; Acadiana Center for the Arts, Lafayette, LA; and other venues. Her work is held in the collections of the City of New Orleans and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. In 2018, she was an emerging artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans.

Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, musician, carpenter and publisher living in New Orleans. My ID, his eleventh book of poetry, was published by BlazeVOX in October, 2019. His novel trilogy, Three Letters, was released in 2021 by Spuyten Duyvil. His verse memoir, Memory Wing, was published by Black Widow in 2011. A chapbook, surrealism, was published in 2016 and translated into Spanish by Enrique Solinas and Peter Thompson; the bilingual edition was released by Yauguru in Uruguay as surrealismo in 2017.

He founded Lavender Ink, a small press devoted mainly to poetry, and Diálogos, devoted to cross-cultural literatures.

He is the co-founder, with Megan Burns, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.

Unlikely Salons were a series of monthly salons of literature and art at the Zeitgeist Theatre and Lounge in Arabi, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans. Unlikely Salons typically featured one writer and one visual artist.

Unlikely Salons were hosted by Jonathan Penton and Leona Strassberg Steiner. The series is now over, but several recordings can be found here at Unlikely Stories Mark V.