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.
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.