LMNL Arts’ Transpoetic Showcase

Judy Lea Steele is an interdisciplinary writer, performer and producer. Her theatrical career spans stage, film, commercials and VO. As an actress, she will return to The Tennessee Williams Theatre Company in The Felt Menagerie this May. Her play, Gerutha and Margaret was a semi-finalist for the 2022 Eugene O’Neill National New Play Conference and is in consideration for production in 2025. Both her plays and poetry are experimental and feminist in nature, exploring actions of self-ventriloquism utilized by women to thrive and sometimes survive in a patriarchal culture. Poetry often grows off of the page into performance. In that vein, her work has appeared in Chicago at IMPACT 2023 and EMXBODY which she also co-curated and produced. Most recently she took part in lmnl arts’ WINTERFEST with an excerpt from her developing audio/text piece, Rooms in Mind. Judy is the owner of Wisteria Root Productions-dedicated to the advancement of women’s voices in the arts, a founding member of Burnished Collective-a grassroots arts salon for women over 40, a founding member of Telling Humans playwright studio, and a member of both Honor Roll and the Dramatists Guild. She is a 2023 MFAW graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an alumna of Northwestern University. Originally a musician, she also sings and fiddles around on the piano, autoharp, melodica and an accordion half her size. And she talks to City Park live oaks. Most importantly, she has finally realized her dream of residing in rather than always returning to New Orleans. She has the brake tag to prove it.

Henry Goldkamp (he/they) is an experimental poet and interdisciplinary artist whose work blurs the boundaries between poetry, visual art, and community performance through public installations of intermedia. He lives in New Orleans, where he co-runs The Splice Poetry Series, acts as intermedia editor for the small press Tilted House, and teaches experimental rhetoric and poetry at Louisiana State University. Art, criticism, and performance appear in Annulet, Indiana Review, Cobra Milk, Accelerants: An Action Books Poetry Film Series, Volt, Triquarterly, Tyger Quarterly, Bat City Review (winner of the 2022 Hybrid Prize), Afternoon Visitor, and DIAGRAM, among others. His public art projects have been covered by NPR’s Morning Edition and Time, and he was recently an artist-in-residence at Mary Sky in Vermont.

Roxi Power is a poet, performer, and publisher whose book, The Songs That Objects Would Sing was published Fall 2023. Her next book of poems is forthcoming from Carbonation Press in 2024. Power is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective where she is a podcaster and event coordinator. She received an AWP Intro Award, her poems have been widely published, and she holds an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University.

Roxi founded and edits the trans-genre anthology series, Viz. Inter-Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she teaches. She performs in many trans-genre forms, including Live Film Narration, or “Neo-Benshi,” around the country, including the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, REDCAT, and the New Orleans Poetry Festival, where she performed her Neo-Benshi version of A Streetcar Named Desire last year. Neo-Benshi is perfect for this liminal city, and she is psyched to be back in NOLA with all you beautiful poets, performers, and shape-shifters.