literature and music—and their creators—matter;
community-building events matter.

Each November, a gathering unfolds in the sacred space of the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts & Cultural Justice in New Orleans, LA. A church-turned-event space, the center still exudes holiness in its mission to bring community together. The 2025 Words and Music Festival will be held here from November 19-22.

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I interviewed Executive Director Dr. Megan Holt about this year’s Festival. About its mission, Dr. Holt explained that the Festival is hosted by the non-profit organization One Book One New Orleans and aims to celebrate New Orleans arts and artists.

“Our mission,” she says, “is to create a space where every voice is valued and validated, and to create a program that represents who we are as a city.” Dr. Holt highlighted how the majority of Festival sessions are free, offering access to the arts for all, and that it’s “a festival with a purpose.” Any profits from Words & Music are invested directly back into One Book One New Orleans' year-round community reading and literacy initiatives.

“Our mission is to create a space where every voice
is valued and validated, and to create a program
that represents who we are as a city.” –Dr. Megan Holt

This year’s line-up of events includes a variety of programming ranging in topic from a famous lost dog to local poetry to Parliament Funkadelic. The Festival opens with Trouble the Water: Remembering the Life and Work of  Dr. Jerry Ward, a prestigious and loved local poet lost recently. Other events during the Festival weekend include Literature & Lunch–Scrim My Tail: As Told to Margaret Orr, The Art of Traumedy, Fifty Years Later: New Orleans’ Vietnamese Literature, Mothership Connections, and Katrina and Rita at 20: A Reading. There’s truly something for everybody—and for all levels of literacy.

I am especially excited for “Art, Climate Change, and the Louisiana Landscape,” a conversation I will moderate between artists of so many media, bringing together words, music, photography, and more. Poets Jack B. Bedell and Brad Richard, multimedia artist Hali Dardar, musician Bruce “Sunpie” Barns, and photographer Frank Relle have all trusted in my vision enough to join together on stage and discuss how words, music, and art can reflect (and perhaps impact) the environments and ecologies we call home.

Eco-poetry is my specialty and my passion, and I’m so excited to hear what artists who engage with it using image and sound—rather than relying purely on language—will have to say about it.

The Festival is celebrating some new additions for 2025. Dr. Holt shared that the New Orleans Public Library will be celebrated in two sessions on Friday, November 2: “The library offers a safe space for everyone. Libraries have shaped lives for generations, and we cannot wait to uplift their work and show them just a little of the support they've always shown our community!”

"Libraries have shaped lives for generations."

True to the mission of libraries everywhere, Words & Music is about more than books. The community benefits of this Festival are not bound by the theatre’s walls or even by the city limits: Words & Music records all sessions, then uploads them to the One Book One New Orleans YouTube channel so that homebound community members and folks all over the world can access their programming for free.

Words & Music is also a template and encouragement: literature and music—and their creators—matter; community-building events matter. It’s not easy to build a Festival, but I think Dr. Holt’s work here shows us that we do have the power to bring our people together using our art forms. Maybe each of us can organize a poetry reading at our local library or even host a little artist salon. There are so many ways to bring community together and listen to each other—big and small.

I hope folks from all over will engage with this important Festival in some way and maybe even bring a part of its mission home. We are stronger together, and this year’s Festival will demonstrate this, as it does every year.

See the full Words & Music schedule here.

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Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter & co-editor of Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry. Winner of the New South Writing Contest, her creative and critical work has appeared in Attached to the Living World, Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, and several other anthologies and journals. Stacey holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Mississippi, Oxford, where she was awarded the Holdich Scholar Award, and an MFA in Poetry from Fresno State. She has been granted fellowships and grants from the Modern Language Association, PEN America, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, among others, in support of her writing. Stacey teaches online at The Poetry Barn and the University of New Orleans.