Alex BellĪ vibrant, witty, bruised, and seductively sharp debut novel from Leilani. Leilani’s voice is as sleek as advertised. Anyone searching for a contemporary voice in this field best look no further. To see more of Deborah's work, visit her website.I was quite captivated by Leilani’s impulsive debut novel that shifts frequently in tone, from light and joyous to raw and sometimes grotesque as it juggles authentic portraits of race and poverty relations, in ways that speak like sharp steel to the American consciousness. Luster is represented by the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City. Smith Memorial Award for Documentary Photography, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (2015). She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her photography including the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize, Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University (2000) the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers (2001) the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2013) and the Michael P. Her work is held in major collections throughout the United States including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian, Washington, DC. She proposes to spend her Fellowship year documenting Angola’s year-round schedule: the archaeological sites, the Portage of the Cross, the Mississippi prison dock, antebellum structures, inmates in the fields, the prison structures and signage, Death Row, and other locations.ĭeborah Luster (1951– ) lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana and Galway, Ireland. The site of the prison has been witness to slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, Black Codes, convict leasing, Jim Crow, the Trustee System, segregation and mass incarceration.

Angola lies on 18,000 acres of the lower Mississippi valley first inhabited by Mastodons and later the Tunica Tribe it takes its name from the antebellum Angola plantation that produced cotton and sugar cane and served as a slave-breeding farm. Building on her deep experience in and connections with officials and inmates in Louisiana, for her Fellowship year, Deborah Luster continues her investigation of violence, place, and prison, with a study of Angola as place.

Luster was then offered an opportunity to return to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola and photograph a Passion Play to be performed by inmates from Angola and Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in St. Johnny “Lee” Stovall (53,) William “Bill” Lindsey (41), Glenda Lockett (45), Diana Variste (48). “1000 North Claiborne Avenue, Roosevelt’s Black Pearl. Luster presents the images with the bare facts of violence: the place, the date, the victims and their ages, the injury, the crime.

Luster the book