A number of distinguished local ladies will be reading from The Beauty Shop Monologues, a chapbook published by Four Zoas Press (1976). The poems take place in Ocean Springs, Mississippi in 1962. At the time, a friend of the poet, visiting San Francisco, reported back that City Lights Bookstore was displaying the book in their windows, and in New York City the Gotham Book Mart nominated it to The Pushcart Prize.

The author, Diane Stevenson, is homegrown. She lived in New York City for a long time, returning to the Gulf Coast in time to lose a house in Katrina. Now she is working on a new book of poems, My Mississippi Cats, that tells the story of the big storm and its aftermath in terms of cats she had then and has now.