NOPF Main Event: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs & Carolina Ebeid & Cornelius Eady Trio

NOPF presents our main event with interdisciplinary poet and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, and multimedia poet Carolina Ebeid. Their performances will be followed by a set from the Cornelius Eady Trio. Performances begin at 7pm on Saturday, April 20th, at Café Istanbul in the New Orleans Healing Center, 2372 St. Claude, New Orleans, LA 70117. This event is free and open to the public. More events at https://nolapoetry.com/

Interdisciplinary poet and sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of Village (Coffee House Press 2023) and TwERK (Belladonna, 2013). She is also the author of three chapbooks, which include Ichi- Ban and Ni-Ban (MOH Press), Manuel is destroying my bathroom (Belladonna*), and the album Televisíon.

Diggs’s work is truly hybrid: languages and modes are grafted together and furl out insistently from each bound splice. Reflecting on Village, Diggs’ most recent collection, Camille Dungy says: “Part instruction manual, part celebration, part dance party, part garden tour, Village refuses compartmentalization, demanding engaged and engaging ways of looking at and talking about difficult shared experiences in English, Portuguese, Tsalagi, Māori, Arabic, Yoruba, and more. These poems by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs reveal the richly diverse ecosystem of what a limited imagination might sideline as a ‘marginalized’ life.” As part of the self-interview project The Next Big Thing, Diggs addressed some of her inspirations for TwERK, including “the overall desire to communicate with other tongues. The fact that most of the world is at the least bi/tri-lingual and a number of Americans still think English is best and fail to hear the Bengali being spoken just feet away from them in the 7-Eleven.”

Diggs has received a 2020 C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, a 2016 Whiting Award and a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, as well as grants and fellowships from the Howard Foundation, Cave Canem, Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, among others.

Diggs has presented and performed at a wide and eclectic array of venues, from California Institute of the Arts and The Museum of Modern Art to the International Poetry Festival of Copenhagen and the International Poetry Festival of Romania. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, Diggs has presented events for BAMCafé, Black Rock Coalition, El Museo del Barrio, La Casita, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and the David Rubenstein Atrium.

She teaches at Brooklyn and Barnard College, and lives in New York City.

Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet and author of You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior and the chapbook Dauerwunder: a brief record of facts. Her work has been supported by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, Bread Loaf, CantoMundo, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, as well as a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.  A longtime editor, she helps edit poetry at The Rumpus, as well as the online zine Visible Binary. From 2023-2025 she is the Bonderman Assistant Professor of poetry at Brown University.

Poet/Playwright/Songwriter and Cave Canem Co-Founder Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is Professor of English, and the John C. Hodge Chair of Excellence at the University of Tenn. Knoxville. He is the author of eight poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Brutal Imagination, and Hardheaded Weather, nominated for an NAACP Image Award. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, which was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1999, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Newsday/Oppenheimer Award for the best first play from an American Playwright in 2002. His “pandemic folk song” project, Don’t Get Dead, recorded with his folk Trio, was released in early November 2021 by June Appal Recordings. His work has appeared on NPR, PBS and BBC Radio and his awards include Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Elizabeth Kray Award from Poets House, where he served as Interim Director from 2021-2022. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cornelius.eady Twitter: https://twitter.com/roughband Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bluespoet/

Lisa Liu is a guitarist based in Brooklyn, NY. She plays gypsy jazz, experimental, folk, and solo guitar. Liu is an Artist Ambassador for Santa Cruz Guitar Company and is also endorsed by Krivo Pickups. She is a Teaching Artist at Django In June, and has also been an Artist In Residence at The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. “Liu performs with a confident grace that reveals an intuitive command of her instrument, and her versatile picking style ranges from a playful nimbleness to straight-up jamming.” – Christa Titus/Billboard Magazine

NYC based guitarist/composer Charlie Rauh has been invited to be resident composer by such organizations as The Rauschenberg Foundation, The Klaustrid Foundation, and The Chen Dance Center.   His work as a soloist has been supported by grants from Meet The Composer, The Untitled Artist Group, and The Fractured Atlas Group. Rauh’s approach to solo guitar composition takes inspiration from folk lullabies, plainchant, and the imagery of various poets ranging from the Brontës to Anna Akhmatova. Acoustic Guitar Magazine notes that “Charlie Rauh plays guitar with a quiet intensity, each note and chord ringing with purpose…With these lullabies Rauh gives a gentle reminder that playing soft and slow can be more impactful than loud and fast.” Rauh is currently signed to the Austin based label Destiny Records as a soloist and recording artist.