Reading this Friday night (June 3rd)

The Arts and Humanities Council of Southwest Louisiana and the Porch Coffee House & Café will present a reading by two local poets, Rita D. Costello and Trée George on Friday, June 3rd, at 7 p.m. at the Porch as part of the First Friday Reading Series. The reading series, which began in January, has showcased the talents of poets and writers in Southwest Louisiana and has helped to generate interest locally in building the Lake Charles literary scene.

Trée George was born and raised in Baton Rouge and received his B.A. and M.A. in history at LSU. He has lived in Tennessee and worked in sales and management training before starting a studio where he works to produce multi-layered artwork with photography, poetry, and fiction. His poems work closely with the prose poem instead of the more traditional forms of poetry. “As a visual learner, my poetry is almost always the byproduct of an image,” George stated. “I see first, write second.”

Originally from New York, Rita D. Costello has lived all over America and China. She is Director of Freshman/Sophomore English at McNeese State in Louisiana and co-editor of the anthology Bend Don't Shatter. Her work has appeared in journals such as: Glimmer Train, ACM, Baltimore Review, and Hawai’i Review. Costello has won the Glimmer Train Poetry Prize and her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.