I’m Always So Serious, a debut poetry collection of Karisma Price, assistant professor of English at Tulane, was published in February by Sarabande Books. Price’s poems center on Blackness, family and loss and weave personal and public histories into a cultural reckoning of the past and present. Price has received several fellowships and was a finalist for the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize. She was the recipient of the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation.

Professor of English and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities Jesmyn Ward was awarded the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. The annual prize honors an American literary writer whose body of work is distinguished for its mastery and originality. Ward is the youngest person to receive the award.

Professor of English Zachary Lazar has published a new book, The Apartment on Calle Uruguay: A Novel (Penguin Random House, 2022). It’s the story of a complicated romance between an artist and a journalist.

T.R. Johnson, professor of English at Tulane, is editor of New Orleans: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which provides detailed discussions on the most significant writing the city of New Orleans has inspired. In a video on the publisher’s website, he mentions several major authors like Joan Didion, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Kate Chopin who spent time in the city.

“They are, in a very concrete way, doing things and reading things that show them that they’re important, that their lives matter and that other people are paying attention to their lives,” Zachary Lazar said in The Creative Brain, a Netflix documentary, about a service-learning creative writing class he teaches to inmates at the Lafayette Parish Correctional Center.