A welcoming and inclusive New Orleans poetry reading series

We started this reading series for our students. Raina is a high school English teacher (and Joseph was a high school Creative Writing, English, and Latin teacher when the reading was founded).

There were a lot of great reading series in the city but not too many of them were comfortable for younger poets to attend, either because they were in bars, were old-fashioned, or weren't very welcoming to newbies.

We wanted to start a reading series that would be welcoming to anyone, encouraged all kinds of different writing styles, and particularly catered to younger poets, a lot of whom hadn't done many live readings.

All kinds of poetry can be great. Whether your poetry is about expressing your interior life, playing with language, sound, weird imagery, journeying in imagined worlds, making esoteric formulations, celebrating nature and animals, perfecting formalism, or even better: a combination of all those and more. Poetry is about openness, writing, learning, and growing. We hope you’ll come to Lucky Bean and experience poetry with us and our friends.


—Joseph Bienvenu & Raina Zelinski