Author Event for Emily Fontenot

302 A Jefferson Street,Lafayette LA 70501

12 January, 2023

Description

Hurricanes, Cypress Trees, and Other Synonyms for Home by Emily Fontenot is a hybrid collection that combines poetry and prose to reckon with a cultural legacy facing the imminent threat of erasure and submersion in the wake of the rising sea levels and catastrophic natural disasters. Fontenot writes with a sense of bravery and resiliency in the face of a bleak, uncertain future. Using careful attention to language, Fonte-not encapsulates the moods of southern culture, which is by turns both beautiful and haunting. The author displays a breadth of emotions that are powerful in their vulnerability, as Fontenot establishes herself as a capable arbiter of a threatened culture. With compassion, creativity, and a healthy respect for the people, places, and experiences that shaped her formative years, Fontenot seeks to preserve these indelible aspects of life in south Louisiana, even as she warns us to “anticipate loss.” Emily Fontenot is a writer from south Louisiana. She is currently working on her PhD in Creative Writing at Illinois State University. An excerpt from her novel-in-progress is now available in South 85 Journal, where it has been nominated for the 2022 Best of the Net Anthology. Her fiction has also been published in Children, Churches and Daddies, Quail Bell Magazine, Gone Lawn, The Southwestern Review, and others and is forthcoming in The Dodge. Her poetry has appeared in Antenna::Signals and in Buddy, a lit zine, where her poem, debris, won their first annual poetry contest.