Brenda Marie Osbey, Louisiana’s first peer-selected Poet Laureate in 2005, was born in New Orleans, LA. In 1978, she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Dillard University and a Master of Arts from the University of Kentucky in 1986. While at the University of Kentucky, she studied with Charles Powell. Her international studies took her to the Université Paul Valéry at Montpélliér, France. Osbey had published four volumes of poetry: Ceremony for Minnecourt (1983, 1985), In These Houses (1988), Desperate Circumstances, Dangerous Woman (1991), and All Saints: New and Selected Poems (1997). It has been written that her work is largely experiential. She had taught at her alma mater and other universities in New Orleans and at the University of California, Los Angeles. Some of her noted accomplishments have been as a scholar-in-residence at Southern University in Baton Rouge, a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College/Harvard University.