Sneak Peek: Katie Bowler Young Podcast

Katie Bowler Young: I think of myself first as a poet and I do see a close relationship between the work that I’ve done on this biography and my life as a poet. I began looking into the life of Enrique Alférez when I was a college student and was going through a difficult time and saw a work of his, “The Fountain of the Four Winds” in a public space and it was someplace I could return to and find solace. I would take my poetry books and sit down between classes and little by little, I wondered who had created it and as I learned more about Alférez, what I came to see was his careful study of the human condition that he represented in the human figure and I think of that very much as the work of the poet as well, that what we are doing or what I am doing in my poetry is trying to go into the interior and really see those connections between human emotion and the outer world and I see that in Alférez’s approach to his artwork as well. He left an impressive mark on the visual landscape of New Orleans between 1929 and 1999.