Mona Lisa Throws A Party

Mona Lisa Throws A Party for My Birthday 1985

at 818 Piety, New Orleans Ninth Ward ("Nigger Town")

She was a spring flower & our love was brief & fleeting.

It was a grand time and very literary. Oh, who would have thought on this wonderful birthday night that Mona Lisa and I would shortly part and cease to be friends and lovers. For our love glowed and lit up the place. Oh, the illusions of the heart and the allusiveness of lasting love.

Staffas Broussard (left) Gillian Conoley, her fiancé Domenic Stansberry (right)

These photos were put together by Mona Lisa. She failed to record the names of those who attended in the album she gave me. But I present them all here, nevertheless, in their anonymity (below), friends or kinsmen of Mona Lisa and most were poets or artists, except for Staffas Broussard, who, I believe, was a computer/math expert.

I hope none of them object.

Mona Lisa Saloy Bio

Mona Lisa Saloy is currently an Associate Professor of English, Director of Creative Writing at Dillard University, and a Doctoral Candidate at LSU in English and Anthropology. Ms Saloy won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the United Negro College Fund/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue her research on Black Beat poet Bob Kaufman, who served as an important link to the Black arts movement. She received the M.F.A. at Louisiana Sate University in Baton Rouge, the M.A. in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, and the B.A. at the University of Washington in Seattle.