Unlikely Saints, September 2023
On September 26, 2023, the Unlikely Saints gathered at Bar Redux in New Orleans for a night of poetry, cupcakes, and fun! Rodger Kamenetz, Wendy Taylor Carlisle, Justin Lacour, and Ashton Young read their poems. This is the full footage of all four readers.
Rodger Kamenetz is a poet and author. His six books of prose include The Jew in the Lotus and the sequel Stalking Elijah: Adventures with Today's Jewish Mystical Masters, which won the National Jewish Book Award. His nine books of poetry include Yonder from Lavender Ink, Dream Logic from PURH in France, and The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022. He was a featured teacher this summer at the first ever Jewish poets conference in Asheville. He also taught for many years at Louisiana State University where he helped found and served as director of the MFA program in creative writing and the Jewish Studies minor. He lives and works in New Orleans. Picture by Michael Hafftka.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for The Mercy of Traffic and this spring, Doubleback Books reprinted her 2008 book, Discount Fireworks, available free at: Doubleback Books. Her website is www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com. Photo by Greg Comnes.
Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. He is the author of five chapbooks of poems, including Hulk Church (Belle Point Press 2023), and Counting the Seconds 'Til Dinner (Lucky Bean 2023).
Ashley Young (Ashton; she/they) is a Black Queer writer, poet, educator, artist & spiritual practitioner. She is a 2010 Voices of Our Nation's Foundation Poetry Fellow and a 2011/2016 Lambda Literary Nonfiction Fellow. Her work has been published in Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press), All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (University of Wisconsin Press) and Lambda Literary Award winning Glitter and Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy (Portland Studio). Ashton lives in their heart town of New Orleans with her sweet service dog, Truce.
