“An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose.”
— Langston Hughes from “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” The Nation, 1926
John Warner Smith
Welcome to the Official Website of the 15th Poet Laureate of Louisiana.
Shaped by history and dedicated to exploring race, resistance, and the human spirit, John Warner Smith brings powerful verse to life.
Available for speaking engagements, book festivals, and events, he offers thought-provoking stories and heartfelt insights to audiences seeking connection through poetry and the transformative lens of history.
Featured Novel:
Murders at Mer Rouge
John Warner Smith's Murders at Mer Rouge is a gripping dramatization of a tragic murder case in northeast Louisiana during the early 1920s. Smith's narrative captures the horror and the outrage over the Ku Klux Klan's violent rule in Morehouse Parish. His excellent novella brings the various heroic, sympathetic, and detestable characters vividly to life. This is a chilling reminder about the profound moral cost to our society of cowardice in the face of murderous racism.
Robert Mann, Professor Emeritus, Louisiana State University
Murders at Mer Rouge is one hundred-year-old tale of vicious murder with Klansmen in the frame, based on fact, but deftly fictionalized by John Warner Smith to capture the terror not only of north Louisiana’s oppressed Ku Klux Klan victims, but of the state and federal leaders who sought to bring justice to the remote rural community.
James Edmunds, Journalist