It’s a Thursday in mid-May, and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, Houston’s multitalented poet laureate emeritus, is busy. She’s getting ready for an event the following night, a collaboration involving herself, jazz drummer and composer Kendrick Scott, and the Harlem String Quartet. They’re honoring the Sugar Land 95, African-Americans who died as convict laborers and whose remains were found in 2018 during excavation for a construction project in Sugar Land, just west of Houston.
After that, she’s off to New York for rehearsals of a new opera, She Who Dared, about the women, including Rosa Parks, who helped desegregate the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system. Mouton wrote the libretto and Dallas composer Jasmine Barnes did the music. The rehearsals culminated in a public workshop on May 31 at the American Lyric Theater in New York. Next up for Mouton: a U.S. book tour in support of her new mythologized memoir, Black Chameleon, then a festival, then the European leg of the book tour.
Her schedule and her energy leave Mouton’s friends shaking their heads. “It’s just mind-blowing,” said Robin Davidson, another former Houston poet laureate and an early editor on many of Mouton’s projects.
