THE GARDEN DISTRICT BOOK SHOP HOSTS LAUNCH EVENT FOR KARISMA PRICE’S I’M ALWAYS SO SERIOUS 

The Garden District Book Shop is thrilled to announce Karisma Price will be at the shop celebrating the launch of her debut collection of poems, I’m Always So Serious, an extended meditation on Blackness, family, and loss. 

The evening will begin at 6:00 PM. Price will first do a reading from I’m Always So Serious followed by a discussion with friend and fellow author, Maurice Carlos Ruffin. Following the discussion, she will be available to chat with guests and sign copies of her book. Books will be available for purchase onsite.

Anchored in New Orleans and New York City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a cultural reckoning of past and present. Exploring if James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr and what If Beale Street Could Talk was recast with characters from The Odyssey. In these pages there is grief, there is absence, there is violence—“We know that mostly everything around us / is measured in blood.”—but there is also immense love and truth. Price has created a serious masterpiece, a book “so dark you have no other option but to call it precious.”

Karisma Price’s work has appeared in Poetry, FourWay Review, Wildness, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and New York University, was a finalist for the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize, and awarded The 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from The Poetry Foundation. She is from New Orleans, LA, and holds an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Tulane University.