This year’s award reception will celebrate the winners of the 2016-2017 Vision + Voice poetry contest, which is open to all A.I.S.D. students K-12. First-choice poems have been paired with art by ACC art students to create posters, and all the winning poems have been collected into the 2016-17 anthology.

Master of Ceremonies for this year’s event will be Brad Richard, chair of the creative writing program at the Lusher Charter school in New Orleans. Richard is the 2015 Louisiana Artist of the Year, and is the author of three collections of poems: Habitations, Motion Studies, and Butcher’s Sugar, and two chapbooks: The Men in the Dark and Curtain Optional. For more information go to visionandvoice.org.