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BOOKS
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City of the Imagination: New Orleans
(New Orleans: A Cultural History in the U.S.)
Co-published by Signal Books and
Oxford University Press USA, 2006
ISBN 1904955029
McKinney seeks to offer in-depth cultural and historical commentary in this addition to Signal Books' "Cities of the Imagination," a series co-published with Oxford University Press. She celebrates the Crescent City while exploring both its links with the past and its unique present-day identity.
Having appeared on the heels of Hurricane Katrina (published in Spring, 2006, following the hurricane in August, 2005), this volume was said to be the first published post-devastation, adopting the spirit "let's save this grand old city, Paris on the Mississippi, the 'Big Easy.''" During the Tennessee Williams Festival that year, The Times-Picayune voted McKinney's book one of the Best of the Fest sellers.
"McKinney's book is not a history per se, but a respectable addition to the shelf of historical guidebooks."
Jason Berry, New Orleans magazine
Louisiana in Words
Ed. Joshua Clark
Pelican Publishing, 2007
ISBN 9781589804296
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Experience a literary "day in the life" capturing a single 24 hours in Louisiana, with stories gleaned from writers all over the world. This anthology, which features Louise McKinney's postcard of Venice, LA, offers 122 nonfiction selections drawn from new and seasoned travel writers.
Says Josh Russell, author of the novel Yellow Jacket and recipient of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, Louisiana in Words is a Book of Hours for a place that's more like a religion than a state."
The Woman Who Drank Her Own Reflection
Guernica Editions Essential Poets, 2013
ISBN 9781550717143
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A sense of place has always dominated the titles of
Louise McKinney's writing life. More than depicting mere geographical adventuring, this collection of poems expresses the poet's personal vision. Setting out on a journey sometimes means the necessity of leaving something behind, passing through wild and dark places of the shadow self, to come to a place where inner and outer landscape merge.
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Writing that traverses inner and outer landscapes. . .
Praise for The Woman Who Drank Her Own Reflection
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"McKinney's poems are all the more interesting for being grounded in a variety of distant places. Yet their landscapes are finally within. . .these poems offer rare gifts of new language and expansive humanity."
Lawrence Hetrick, author of Derelict Tributaries (Anhinga Press, 2011)
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