In Katrina's Wake

For the final project in their English IV: Katrina in Literature class, a group of seniors planned a trip to New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast to connect with the people and places that they have encountered through their studies. The students visited the Katrina memorial in Biloxi, Mississippi (above). In the memoir Beyond Katrina by Natasha Trethewey, the United States Poet Laureate, the author explores the irony that this memorial was constructed by the HGTV Extreme Home Makeover team when they were in Biloxi supposedly to renovate homes. Another stop on the group's tour was St. Stephen’s Church in DeLisle, Mississippi. DeLisle is the town upon which the fictional town of Bois Sauvage is based. Bois Sauvage is the setting for Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award winning novel Salvage the Bones. As the group drove through DeLisle, the students read passages from the novel and compared what Ward had written to the real thing. Some of the travelers enjoyed a senior sunrise on the beach at Bay St. Louis. Through Beyond Katrina, the class learned that the beach along the MS gulf coast is the longest man made beach in the world, and that its construction on top of mangrove swamps led to environmental damage that exacerbated the effect of storms like Katrina. Finally, in New Orleans, the group toured the Katrina museum at the Presbytere and the Levee Museum in central city at the site of one of the canal breaks.