Mona Lisa Saloy is professor of English at Dillard University. She previously published Red Beans & Ricely Yours, which won the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Prize in 2006. Saloy’s literary voice represents the African-American and the New Orleans Creole cultural experience.

Books by Mona Lisa Saloy:

Mona Lisa Saloy on Twitter.

About Second Line Home:

"Mona Lisa Saloy is a poet whose words give us shelter. A poet who has feeding us always on her mind. Keep your starched white dinner napkins for another kind of meal and for guests that eat in a hurry. Bring your hunger for family that still kisses each other at the open door and memory that knows the storm will end and the sun will rise again."
—Nikky Finney

"In Second Line, poet Mona Lisa Saloy captures the spirit and cadence of New Orleans. The book is at once a haunting poetic narrative of the horror of Hurricane Katrina and an uplifting, healing song of personal and collective resilience. Saloy tells of muck, stink, doors swollen with water, despair, and bottled-up hurt, while finding hope, sustenance, and solace in familial love, spirituality, and the Creole cultural traditions that nurtured her. Saloy's artistry is particularly evident in her use of metaphors: 'Broke his heart in half like a walnut split down the middle.' And she seasons her aesthetic with Creole vernacularisms such as hucklebucks (frozen drinks) and meliton (mirliton). And naturally, there is the inevitable remix of pulsating music for which the city is famous: Johnny Adams, Fats Domino, and Alan Toussaint. This is a collection of poems that must be read!"
—Tony Bolden

"'Z'Haricots Rouge'—Red beans and black love. At the heart of Mona Lisa Saloy's book is an act of interdiction, an interruption of one American language with another. In acts of simultaneous self-translation, these poems find those spaces among tongues where taste turns to truth, 'tastes like more.'"
—Aldon Lynn Nielsen