The Book of Rougarou

John Sullivan’s hybrid theater and poetry collection, The Book of Rougarou: Sorcery and Songs of the Wolf, is part of our 2025 chapbook series sponsored by a grant from the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

Get Your Copy!#

The book is available on Amazon.

Library Donations#

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After you’re done reading the book, just drop it off at your local public, university, or high school library, then email us at info@ogre.red with the name and location of the library. We’ll credit you as a sponsor here on this page.

Reviews#

It doesn’t happen often – way less often than a blood moon, actually – but every once in a while a book hits my desk with the energy of an atom bomb. Projective. As in Olson’s “Projective.” All energy and muscle, drama, and blunt force.

That’s exactly how I would describe John Sullivan’s The Book of Rougarou. Part opera, part Mamet, part Saturday morning fantasy. Purely kinetic in the most interesting ways. Come to this one for the language. Come to it for the imagination of its characters. The dialog. Come to it for its poetry. But I’d say come to it for your own good.

Or, as my mom used to tell me before she put me to bed every night, “The Rougarou will be coming for your fingers and toes while you sleep.”

Dr. Jack B. Bedell, Ghost Forest, Poet Laureate of Louisiana (2017-2019)

John Sullivan’s The Book of Rougarou is Cajun in every which unique way – a poetic drama, lyrical and magical, and it crosses plains of times and lands from medieval castles to Ella Fitzgerald. Allegorical and mythological – musically profound in language and dreams, Sullivan sculpts a powerful statue in the surreal world of Cajun culture and legacy.

Shome Dasgupta, Editor, Wigleaf Top 50

Review Copies#

To review the book for your publication or blog, please email us at info@ogre.red and we’d be happy to send along a free PDF review copy.

About the Author#

John Sullivan was an ACTF Playwriting finalist, received the Jack Kerouac Literary Prize, the Writers Voice: New Voices of the West Award, AZ Arts Fellowships (Poetry & Playwriting), an Artists Studio Center Fellowship, and a WESTAF Fellowship.

He was a featured playwright at Denver’s Changing Scene Summer Playfest, an Eco-Arts Fellow with Earth Matters On Stage, Artistic Director of Theater Degree Zero, and directed the Augusto Boal / Theatre of the Oppressed wing at the Seattle Public Theater.

With Sheli Rae, he facilitated a series of acting and playwriting workshops inside the Pima County Jail in conjunction with the Pima County Library and the Tucson Writers Project.

He has served as the drama features editor for a Canadian literary magazine, Fleas on the Dog.

John has also published The Big Forever Swim in our in-house chapbook series, as well as poetry with us in Issue 14, November 2022, and a set of spoken work audioscapes in Issue 29, April 2025.

About the Artist#

A retired educator, Dave Sims now makes art and music in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. His poems, stories, comix and paintings both old-school and digital appear not only upon record cover albums (Pull the Plug) and forearm tattoos (Kaboom!), but also the walls, covers and inside pages of nearly one hundred tactile and virtual publications and exhibits. Find him online at tincansims.com.

Dave also designed the cover art and illustrated the interior panels for LARPing IRL in our Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association grant chapbook series, and has published visual art in Issue 23, April 2024.

More Books#

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