Darrell Bourque

Darrell Bourque was born in southwest Louisiana in 1942. He started publishing poems when he worked on his Ph. D. at Florida State in the mid-70s and is the author of six books of poems: Plainsongs (issue # 1 in the Cajun writers series of Cross Cultural Communications, Merrick, NY,1994), The Doors Between Us (the inaugural issue of the Louisiana Writers Chapbook Series of Louisiana Literature Press,1997), Burnt Water Suite (Wings Press, San Antonio,1999), The Blue Boat (the inaugural issue of University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press's Louisiana Writers Series, 2004), and Call and Response: Conversations in Verse (with Jack B. Bedell- Texas Review Press, 2009), and In Ordinary Light, New and Selected Poems (University of Louisiana Press, 2010). He was named the Artist of the Year by the Acadiana Arts Council in 2001 and he served as both President of the National Association of Humanities Education and Editor in Chief of its journal Interdisciplinary Humanities. He is professor emeritus in English at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette and he was named poet laureate of Louisiana by Governor Kathleen Blanco in 2007. He served in that capacity in 2007 and 2008 and was reappointed to the position in 2009 by Governor Bobby Jindal. Bourque lives with his wife Karen, a glass artist, in rural southwest Louisiana.