Louis E. Bourgeois
I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on February 19, 1970, to a working class family and raised primarily in New Orleans East along the Bayou Sauvage. At the age of 18, I was involved in a serious car accident that resulted in the loss of my left arm. This led me to the gifts that reading poetry and writing poetry have to offer. In a certain sense, poetry has given me a new life. I’m fairly certain that the enclosed poems do not deal with disability in a direct sense. More likely, they represent a mind that is trying to come to terms with a world that is indifferent to all things, including a person with a disability.
I left New Orleans when I was 19 to attend college at Louisiana State University. In 1996, I earned a BA in English and was the first graduate of the University of Mississippi’s new MFA program in creative writing in 2002. Currently, I’m an instructor of English at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. I am also poetry editor of the university’s literary journal, Yalobusha Review. I’ve published over 80 poems in America and Europe in such journals as The Southern Review, Parnassus, The Oxford American, Poem, and Tundra. My first book of poetry, Olga, is forthcoming in 2005 from Word Press.
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Posted: Monday, April 11th, 2005 - Filed in Poetry, Writing | 1 Comment »