Mona Lisa Saloy

Mona Lisa Saloy, PhD, Louisiana Poet Laureate 2021-2023, is an author, folklorist, Louisiana Folklife Commissioner, educator, and scholar of Creole culture in articles, documentaries, and poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina. She is currently Conrad N. Hilton Endowed Professor of English at Dillard University. Her books include Red Beans & Ricely Yours ( including the banned poem “The N Word”), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Her second collection, Second Line Home, focuses on New Orleans Black Creole culture. Recent publications include The Chicago Quarterly Review, Vol 33; Introduction to Black Fire—This Time; Southern Voices: Fifty Contemporary Poets; and LMNL Poetry Anthology, Fall 2024. Her third book, Black Creole Chronicles: Poems (UNO Press 2023), was chosen for One Book One New Orleans in 2024 and Book of the Month at The Whitney Plantation Museum. Saloy was named Louisianian of the Year in Literature: 2024 in Louisiana Life Magazine and received the Tennessee Williams Excellence in Literary Arts Award in 2025. She was mentioned in “Read Your Way through New Orleans,” by Maurice Carlos Ruffin in the New York Times Book Review, 2024, and was recently featured on CBS Sunday Morning. With former Louisiana Poet Laureate John Warner Smith, Saloy edited Hurricanes Katrina & Rita at 20, An Anthology of Poetry with Art, Black Bayou Press, 2025.