NOLA's NEW BOOK ROUND UP

Name: NOLA's NEW BOOK ROUND UP
Start: 2025-12-10T19:30:00-06:00
Location: Bar Redux

Schedule

Wed, 10 Dec, 2025 at 07:30 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

Bar Redux | New Orleans, LA

Mark your calendars, lit lovers!
The NOLA New Book Round Up returns on Wednesday, December 10, 2025, and we’re closing out the year with a night built for readers, writers, and anyone who can’t resist the smell of a freshly cracked spine.
Expect new releases, unexpected discoveries, and that signature Bar Redux mix of cozy corners, good company, and literary curiosity. M.A. Nicholson will be hosting once again, bringing together another stellar lineup of local writers doing exciting work across genres.
Come share some libations, hear something new, and help us wrap up the year with readings by the following:
Skye Jackson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work has appeared in RHINO, The Southern Review, Palette Poetry, RATTLE and elsewhere. Her poetry has been a finalist for the Iowa Review Poetry Award, the RATTLE Poetry Prize, the RHINO Founders' Prize, and she was a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award. Jackson’s work was also selected by Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project. She currently serves as a Visiting Writer & Lecturer at Xavier University Louisiana, Chairwoman of the New Orleans Poetry Festival and was appointed the Writer-in-Residence of the Jack Kerouac House for summer 2025. Her debut poetry collection, Libre, was recently published by Regalo Press.
Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans with his wife and three children, and edits Trampoline Poetry. His first full-length collection of poems, A Reading from the Book of Panic, was recently published by Lavender Ink.
Jonathan Penton founded the online journal Unlikely Stories in 1998. Since then, he has husbanded it through several incarnations, founding Unlikely Stories Six in 2025. He also ran a daughter imprint, Unlikely Books, from 2005-2024. He has served in editorial, management, and technical roles for numerous arts organizations, including the New Orleans Poetry Festival, Rigorous: a journal by BIPOC, MadHat, Inc., and Big Bridge. His previous books of poems are BACKSTORIES (Argotist Ebooks, 2017), Standards of Sadiddy (Lit Fest Press, 2016), Prosthetic Gods (New Sins Press/Winged City Chapbooks, 2008), Painting Rust and Blood and Salsa (Unlikely Books, 2005), and Last Chap (Vergin’ Press, 2004).
Brad Richard’s books include Turned Earth (Louisiana State University Press, 2025), Motion Studies (The Word Works, 2011; 2nd, expanded edition, 2025), Butcher’s Sugar (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012), and Parasite Kingdom (The Word Works, 2019). After many years of high school and college teaching, he is now primarily a freelance teacher and editor. Series editor of the Hilary Tham Capital Collection from The Word Works, he lives, writes, and gardens in New Orleans. More at bradrichard.org.
Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was born in Hialeah, Florida and graduated from Florida International University in Miami, Florida, and has an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. Romaguera has been published in Passages North, Catapult, PANK Magazine, Massachusetts Review, Latino Book Review and other publications. He is a VONA alum, a 2023 Periplus Fellow, and he participated in the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project in 2023. Romaguera translation of the Mexican novel, Charras, written by Hernán Lara Zavala, was released in 2025 by UNO Press. The book follows 26-year-old Efraín "El Charras" Calderón Lara, a union leader and student activist, who was kidnapped and murdered by the Yucatean government in 1974. The story unfolds pitting the state-sanctioned narrative against the testimony of those who were involved.
Michael Allen Zell is a New Orleans-based novelist, screenwriter, journalist, and playwright. He is best known for his crime fiction series featuring Bobby Delery, a Tulane University Criminology professor, who is forced to right wrongs on the streets of New Orleans. The L.A. Review of Books praised Zell for demonstrating "a gallows humor and a fine ear for entertainment…like the best crime fiction, the story invests deeply in setting, and it succeeds by
virtue of its author’s palpable love for New Orleans and the people who live there.” In The Times-Picayune, Susan Larson wrote, “What really keeps us turning pages is Zell’s authorial voice, his insights into human nature, and the dark sense of humor that comes out of observing city life.”