Karisma Price

A native New Orleanian, Karisma Price is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. A poet and screenwriter, she is the author of I'm Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023) which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick. Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry, Indiana Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, and elsewhere. She is a 2025 Whiting Award Winner in Poetry, a Cave Canem Fellow, a 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review, and was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University.

Artist Statement

In my writing, I explore the inner workings of family, my own as well as families in myth and history. I focus on my New Orleans upbringing and how the south informs my view of the world, as well as kinship, loss, social issues, and the anxieties one has after the death of a parent. The ethos that drives my poetry is what I call “responsible empathy”: I begin every poem with research in order to represent people and events in a holistic manner and to transcribe the emotional truth of my subjects. It is necessary for me to use my poetry to document not only the people in my personal life, but also New Orleans as a subject. James Baldwin said, “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” So often people Disneyfy New Orleans and view it solely as a place of jazz music and alcohol. I want my readers to be conscious of climate change, environmental racism, and the gentrification altering the racial and cultural landscape of Post-Katrina New Orleans.