Books by Mona Lisa Saloy
Red Beans and Ricely Yours: Poems
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Mona Lisa Saloy, Author and Folklorist, is currently visiting
Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle for
the 2005-06 year; for 2006-07 academic year. Since,
Katrina, she is on leave from Dillard University where she developed their
Creative Writing Program.
Her Ph.D. is in English from Louisiana State University in
Baton Rouge where she received the MFA in Creative Writing. Mona Lisa’s first
collection of verse,
Red Beans and Ricely Yours: Poems, won the T. S. Eliot Prize
in poetry for 2005, published by Truman State University Press. She is
also
Winner of
the PEN Oakland National Literary Award.
Dr. Saloy’s verse appears in the anthology:
Furious Flower: African American
Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present. Joanne V. Gabbin,
editor. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Occasionally,
Mona Lisa writes and reads commentaries on the Black historical 7th Ward
neighborhood in New Orleans for Public Radio, WWNO, 89.9 fm. Some of Saloy’s
articles on Toasts, and the Lore of African American children are available on
the Web at the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Folklife site.
more bio
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Creative writing +
The Dillard Review /
Mona Lisa’s First Website
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Treme: Beyond Bourbon Street (HBO)
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Creative Writing at Dillard /
Dillard Faculty Focus /
English Faculty Focus Dillard /
Dillard Writing Successes /
Poems: Red Beans and Ricely Yours
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Mona
Lisa Saloy is associate professor of English and Founding Director of
Creative Writing at Dillard University, and Director of The
Daniel C. Thompson/Samuel Du Bois Honors Program. Dr.
Saloy's first collection of verse,
Red Beans and Ricely Yours: Poems, won the T. S. Eliot Prize
in poetry for 2005, published by Truman State University Press. She
has also won fellowship from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and from the United Negro College Fund/Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation. Her poems have appeared in anthologies,
magazines, journals, and film. She received her PhD in English
and MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University and
her MA in creative writing and English from San Francisco State
University. Displaced by Hurricane Katrina, Saloy
was a
visiting associate professor of English and creative writing at
the University of Washington for the 2005/2006 academic
year.
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Karma’s Footsteps
By Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie
Somebody has to tell the truth sometime, whatever that truth may be. In this, her début full collection, Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie offers up a body of work that bears its scars proudly, firm in the knowledge that each is evidence of a wound survived. These are songs of life in all its violent difficulty and beauty; songs of fury, songs of love. 'Karma's Footsteps' brims with things that must be said and turns the volume up, loud, giving silence its last rites. "Ekere Tallie's new work 'Karma's Footsteps' is as fierce with fight songs as it is with love songs. Searing with truths from the modern day world she is unafraid of the twelve foot waves that such honesties always manifest. A poet who "refuses to tiptoe" she enters and exits the page sometimes with short concise imagery, sometimes in the arms of delicate memoir. Her words pull the forgotten among us back into the lightning of our eyes.—Nikky Finney /
Ekere Tallie Table
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Her Voice /
Mother Nature: Thoughts on Nourishing Your
Body, Mind, and Spirit During Pregnancy and Beyond www.ekeretallie.com
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Red Beans and Ricely Yours
By Mona Lisa Saloy
Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy has achieved a similar liberation and transformation with
this new book of poems. Such personal victories always deserve great
applause, especially when they are achieved so wonderfully.
No writer or group of writing comes to mind
of Black New Orleans that captures the New Orleans life in so
wondrous a painting, musical composition—not Kalamu ya Salaam,
not Brenda Marie Osbey, not even Marcus Bruce Christian. None
expresses such love and devotion, none so realistically and
approachable, none so fully and delightfully as we find in
Red Beans and Ricely Yours(2005). These fifty poems or so of a
life murdered by human neglect and disregard are insights won
with blood and tears.
I remind you the book should have been the first three
sections (36 poems), except for a few
other poems in the other two sections
(16 poems). Whatever flaw the book may
have, one delights even in them. All the
poems are well done and will be enjoyed.
Folks, we have a classic here that will
make an excellent gift for any occasion.
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I have the hardback edition. One on your shelf,
everybody’ll know you have good taste, New Orleans style.
A final note: I’m told that Louis Armstrong
used to sign all his letters
Red Beans and Ricely Yours.
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Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world. |
Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.
Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies. As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Life on Mars
By Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly noted the collection's "lyric brilliance" and "political impulses [that] never falter." A New York Times review stated, "Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we're alone in the universe; it's to accept—or at least endure—the universe's mystery. . . . Religion, science, art: we turn to them for answers, but the questions persist, especially in times of grief. Smith's pairing of the philosophically minded poems in the book’s first section with the long elegy for her father in the second is brilliant." Life on Mars follows Smith's 2007 collection, Duende, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the only award for poetry in the United States given to support a poet's second book, and the first Essence Literary Award for poetry, which recognizes the literary achievements of African Americans.
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The Body’s Question (2003) was her first published collection. Smith said Life on Mars, published by small Minnesota press Graywolf, was inspired in part by her father, who was an engineer on the Hubble space telescope and died in 2008.
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Aké: The Years of Childhood
By Wole Soyinka
Aké: The Years of Childhood is a
memoir of stunning beauty, humor, and
perception—a
lyrical account of one boy's attempt to
grasp the often irrational and
hypocritical world of adults that
equally repels and seduces him. Soyinka
elevates brief anecdotes into history
lessons, conversations into morality
plays, memories into awakenings. Various
cultures, religions, and languages
mingled freely in the Aké of his youth,
fostering endless contradictions and
personalized hybrids, particularly when
it comes to religion. Christian
teachings, the wisdom of the ogboni, or
ruling elders, and the power of
ancestral spirits—who
alternately terrify and inspire him—all
carried equal metaphysical weight.
Surrounded by such a collage, he notes
that "God had a habit of either not
answering one's prayers at all, or
answering them in a way that was not
straightforward."
In writing from a child's perspective,
Soyinka expresses youthful idealism and
unfiltered honesty while escaping the
adult snares of cynicism and
intolerance. His stinging indictment of
colonialism takes on added power owing
to the elegance of his attack.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update
29 July 2012
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