Authors and Artists 2014

Take a look at the fascinating authors and artists joining the faculty of Words & Music, 2015!

Tad Bartlett writes fiction, poetry, and essays. His photography and essays have appeared in a semi-monthly series on the website of the Oxford American, as well as in the Mobile Press-Register and the Selma Times-Journal. His short stories have been cited for Honorable Mention in the February 2013 Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers, and placed as finalists in the 2012 and 2013 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Read more…

ANN BENOIT is a commercial food photographer and culinary writer native to New Orleans. She is author and photographer of the highly acclaimed Broussard’s Restaurant and Courtyard Cookbook and New Orleans Best Ethnic Restaurants and the photographer of Magic In A Shaker. She is a member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, the American Culinary Federation, and the James Beard Foundation. Read more…

George Bishop is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Letter to My Daughter, which at its core is a story of the collateral damage of war, with the book’s Vietnam episodes giving the book its moral center. His new novel, The Night of the Comet, like his first book, centers on a family and the relationships between family members. Bishop holds an MFA  from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Read more…

Darrell Bourque, former Poet Laureate of Louisiana, is the recipient of the 2014 Louisiana Writer Award given annually to recognize outstanding contributions to Louisiana’s literary and intellectual life. Bourque is the 15th recipient of the annual award given by Louisiana Center for the Book in the State Library of Louisiana for contributions exemplified by a writer’s body of work. Read more…

Dawn Harris Brown was born in Texas into a ranching family.  Her first culinary influences were barbeque and Mexican food.  After majoring in art at the University of Madrid, she spent another three-and-a-half years in southern Spain.  Food became her art form.  She attended cooking schools in France, England, Morocco, the United States, Canada, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Recently, she created the Browncroft Publishing Company, located in Covington, LA. She worked with author Nia Terezakis, M.D., to create and publish the lifestyle book, Artful Feast. Read more…

Angela Carll, author of Where Writers Wrote in New Orleans, is real estate writer and photographer for the Sunday New Orleans Advocate real estate page. She has also worked as a special sections writer for The Times-Picayune, an obituary writer for The Times-Picayune after Hurricane Katrina, a freelance writer for The Times-Picayune on home renovations and neighborhoods, a writer on real estate and neighborhoods for New Orleans Life and Home Magazine, and an advertorial writer for New Orleans Magazine. Read more…

Katherine Center is the author of four bittersweet comic novels about love and family, including The Bright Side of Disaster, Everyone Is Beautiful, Get Lucky, and The Lost Husband.  Her books and essays have appeared in Redbook, People, USA Today, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Real Simple, Houstonia, the Dallas Morning News, and the Houston Chronicle. Read more…

Alexandra Cichon, Ph.D., wounded healer, researcher, actor, and psychodramatist, received her doctorate in clinical psychology, within the tradition of depth psychology, from Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. As an actor, she is the recipient of the Oxford University Dramatic Society’s Best Actress Award, for a performance piece she conceived and directed for ensemble on the Sumerian myth of Inanna and Ereshkigal, and the Joseph Jefferson Award for Performance. Read more…

Emily Choate has been awarded writer’s residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts,  ISLAND (Institute for Sustainable Living, Art, and Natural Design), and has placed three times in the Society’s William Faulkner -William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Emily’s writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Florida Review, Chapter 16, Yemassee, Nashville Scene, and The Double Dealer. A native Nashvillian, she now lives at the wooded edge of the city, where she’s working on a novel. Read more…

Hal Clark’s novel, Marrero Action, was a finalist in the 2007 Faulkner Prizes Competition, and he has also been a finalist with other work. He adapted Marrero Action into a stage play which ran for a month in 2009 at the Anthony Bean Theater in New Orleans and also enjoyed a second successful run last year. His new play, Fishers of Men, played to sell out audiences in 2012.  His talk show, WYLD-FM’s Sunday Journal with Hal Clark, won the award for Best Radio Talk Show at the 2009, 2010, and 2011 Press Club of New Orleans Excellence in Journalism Awards Galas. Read more…

Caroline Clarke has held several key positions, including executive editor and editorial director, at Black Enterprise, a multimedia company. Caroline also hosted the syndicated television show Black Enterprise Business Report and launched Black Enterprise Books, a series of ten business and investing books co-published with John Wiley & Sons. Her new book, Postcards from Cookie, is a surprising and moving memoir by an adopted child who as an adult went looking for information on her biological family—and discovered to her shock that she was in fact the long-lost granddaughter of Nat “King” Cole. Read more…

Amy Carolyn Conner, born in Cheyenne, WY, grew up in Jackson, MS, and completed her BA in philosophy and ethics with honors at Newcomb College of Tulane University after an interval at The Yorkshire Riding Center in Harrogate, England, acquiring horse-training skills. She married Zachary Casey, a native New Orleanian, and settled in New Orleans for a few months before Casey moved the family to Singapore, a professional relocation. They had two children, Fionn and Rue Casey before they divorced. Read more…

Moira Crone has published three novels and three books of stories, including What Gets Into Us. Her work appears in Oxford American, Triquarterly, Habitus, and New Orleans Review. Winner of the Faulkner Society’s gold medals for both Novella and Short Story, her stories have been selected for New Stories From The South five times. Her new novel, The Ice Garden, is a Fall 2014 release from Carolina Wren Press. Read more…

Stanley Crouch, author of the long-awaited new biography of famed jazzman Charlie Parker, Kansas City Lightning, has been writing about jazz music and the African American experience for more than forty years. He has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award, for his essay collections Notes of a Hanging Judge (1990) and The All-American Skin Game (1995). His other books include Always in Pursuit (1998), The Artificial White Man (2004), and the novel Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome (2000). His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Vogue, Downbeat, Partisan Review, The New Republic, the New York Times, and elsewhere. Read more…

Rosemary Daniell’s book Secrets of the Zona Rosa: How Writing (and Sisterhood) Can Change Women’s Lives, was published by Henry Holt and Company, 2006 to great acclaim. Known as one of the best writing coaches in the country, Rosemary is the founder of Zona Rosa, the series of creative writing workshops she has led for 30 years in Savannah, Atlanta, and other cities (including New Orleans), as well as in Europe. Currently she is completing a new memoir and traveling to teach her writing techniques. Read more…

Rod Davis, award-winning author of Corina’s Way, is being compared James M. Cain and Mickey Spillane with his new Southern noir novel South, America. The mystery is set in pre-Katrina New Orleans. On an early Sunday morning walk through the empty streets of the Faubourg Marigny, downriver of the French Quarter, maverick journalist and Big Easy transplant Jack Prine discovers the body of a well-dressed black man with a bashed-in skull. Soon Jack is drawn into a web of violence threatening Elle Meridian, the victim’s beautiful, complicated sister, who is burdened with a past she can barely confess. They begin a dangerous, desperate flight through Alabama, the Delta, and back to New Orleans, searching and evading goons, racists, voudou, and family secrets. Read more…

Loraine Despres is a novelist and recovering screenwriter. Her first novel, The Scandalous Summer of Sissy Leblanc was a national best seller, a Literary Guild Selection and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. It’s now in its 25^th printing. It engendered The Southern Belle’s Handbook, Sissy Leblanc’s Rules to Live By. She followed Sissy with The Bad Behavior of Belle Cantrell, set in Louisiana in the turbulent 1920s. Before writing novels, she wrote screenplays, pilots and numerous TV episodes, but is best remembered for that icon of pop culture, the “Who Shot J.R.? episode of DALLAS. Read more…

 

Carole Di Tosti is a published writer. She currently writes for Blogcitics, TMR, and New York Theater Wire. She wrote 310 articles for Technorati between 2011-2013. Ms. Di Tosti is an advocate for various issues and has written articles on topics as diverse as labeling GMOs to decrying the discriminatory image of women in the media. As a journalist, she covered the 22nd Hamptons Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Athena Film Festival, Reeabilities, New York Film Festival, 21st Hamptons Film Festival, the 23rd New York Jewish Film Festival, etc. She has interviewed film directors and actors. Her reviews of films, plays and books appear in Blogcritics, New York Theater Wire and All Along the NYC Skyline. Read more…

 

Claire Dixon was born in Manchester, England and grew up in Ontario, Canada. She studied Creative Writing at Montreal’s Concordia University, earning a bachelor’s degree, then moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to join Louisiana State University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. Following graduation from the MFA program, Claire enrolled in LSU’s School of Library and Information Science, where she obtained an MLIS degree. Close to completing a full-length poetry manuscript, she is “very grateful for the encouragement that this award brings.” Read more…

Nancy Dixon is an English professor at Dillard University in New Orleans and has been studying, teaching, and writing about Louisiana literature for over twenty years. Her first book, Fortune and Misery: Sallie Rhett Roman of New Orleans (LSU Press, 1999), won the LEH Humanities Book of the Year award, 2000. Read more…

Carleton Eastlake took his graduate degree at Harvard Law School with a concentration in law and the social sciences. While in law school, he interned with NASA’s manned Mars mission program. Following graduation, he became a Confidential Attorney-Adviser to a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission and then spent a year in private practice as an antitrust and complex case litigator before returning to the FTC. He broke into Hollywood as a writer-producer of crime and espionage dramas. Read more…

Liv Evensen, Ph.D. of Oslo, Norway, is Jungian-trained in spiritual psychology. She is an oral story teller, expressive arts therapist, and poet who speaks internationally on myths, fables and fairy tales in multicultural communications, conducts creative courses and does international lectures on intuitive painting, creative writing, oral storytelling, and dreams. With the counseling of a Dream Mentor, she has been writing poems from her dreams since 2005. Read more…

Randy Fertel, Ph.D., author of the new non-fiction book, A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation, has taught English at the university level at Harvard, Tulane, LeMoyne College, the University of New Orleans, and most recently with the Graduate Faculty of the New School University. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard, where he received a teaching award bestowed by student vote. His first book was a New Orleans memoir based on his parents, The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak, which won widespread acclaim. Read more…

Rien Fertel is a writer and professor of history at Tulane University and Bard Early College New Orleans. He has written for a variety of local and national publications. His first book, Inventing the Creole City, a history of early New Orleans literature and literary myth-making, is out now from Louisiana State University Press. Read more…

Tina Freeman is a photographer of architecture, portraits, and interiors. She illustrated the book, Color: Natural Palettes for Painted Rooms, by Donald Kaufman and Taffy Dahl (Clarkson-Potter, New York, 1992). Her photographs have appeared in national and international magazines including House & Garden, Connoisseur, Southern Accents, Art & Antiques and The New York Times Magazine. Tina Freeman lives in New Orleans and Italy. Read more…

 

Paul Goussot is the organist of the historic Dom Bédos organ (built 1748) of the Abbey of Sainte-Croix in Bordeaux, France, and professor of organ at the Conservatoire Reuil-Malmaison. Accepted into the Conservatoire de Paris at the age of 16, he earned diplomas in a variety of disciplines: organ, harpsichord, harmony, counterpoint, fugue, improvisation, and pedagogy. In 2009, he was named the first young artist in residence at the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. Read more…

 

 

 

M. A. Harper, a southern farmer’s daughter, was once a free-lance commercial artist. But upon her discovery that no picture is always worth 1,000 words, she took the 1,000-word option and ran with it. Her published works include novels, children’s plays, nonfiction articles and the online Faint Glow Blog. Fascinated by those thin places where reality seems to give way into something Other, her fiction can be described as Supernatural Lite. Read more..

 

 

 

W. Kenneth Holditch is a Research Professor Emeritus from the University of New Orleans, where he taught for 32 years. He is the founding editor of The Tennessee Williams Journal and has published numerous short stories, poems, periodical articles, and critical essays on William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Anne Rice, and many others. Holditch was a founder of the Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans, Tennessee Williams Festival in Clarksdale, MS, the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society, and the Words and Music Festival. Read more…

Rosemary James has had a dual career in communications and interior design. As a journalist, she started her career as a high school student writing features for the Pulitzer Prize winning weekly, the Myrtle Beach Sun, and then for The Charleston News & Courier Evening Post in her hometown. Her career in New Orleans began in 1964 with the States-Item, where she covered the maritime and oil and gas industries. She is co-founder of the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society and the creator of Words & Music: a Literary Feast in New Orleans. Read more…

Rodger Kamenetz ,poet, essayist, non-fiction author, teacher, and popular lecturer, long associated with Words & Music and the Faulkner Society, has a wonderful new collection of poetry out, To Die Next to You. For the last several years, Rodger has been deeply involved in research and analysis of what our dreams mean, research which produced the compelling book, The History of Last Night’s Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul. Read more…

Mary Helen Lagasse is a classically trained artist and a prize-winning fiction and non-fiction writer. Ms. Lagasse, who has been a member of the Faulkner Society’s Advisory Council, has appeared as a presenter at Words & Music and other Society events. Her first novel, The Fifth Sun, was awarded the IPPY Award for Best Multicultural Fiction 2005, the Premio Atzlan Literary Award, and the Marmol Prize. She currently is working on a new book, Navel of the Moon, set in the historic Irish Channel of New Orleans. Read more…

Zachary Lazar is the author of four books, including the novel Sway, which was chosen as a Best Book of 2008 by the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Publisher’s Weekly, and Newsday, was an Editor’s Choice at the New York Times Book Review, and was a finalist for the Discover Great New Writers Award at Barnes & Noble. His memoir Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder was a Best Book of 2009 in the Chicago Tribune. His latest novel, I Pity the Poor Immigrant, published in spring of 2014, has received high praise by such reviewers as Rich Cohen for the New York Times Book Review. Lazar published his first novel, Aaron, Approximately, in 1988. Read more…

Daniel Lelchuck joined the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra as assistant principal cellist in fall 2013. Described by the Washington Post as a “dazzling virtuoso,” he is the recipient of an award from the Angela Prokopp Foundation of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. He has performed at numerous international festivals, including those of Aspen, Baden-Baden, Tanglewood, and Salzburg. A founding member of the Castleton Chamber Players with violinist Eric Silberger, Lelchuk has played since 2010 as principal cellist of the Castleton Festival, in Virginia, under Maestro Lorin Maazel. Read more…

 

Nghana Lewis, J.D. and Ph.D, is Suzanne and Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellow and Associate Professor of English and African & African Diaspora Studies at Tulane University. She is a scholar in the work of Afro-American authors. Her research interests also include black literary and popular cultural studies, K-12 educational policy studies, and HIV/AIDS. Read more…

 

The Rev. William F. Maestri is a Roman Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Ordained in 1977, the vast majority of his priestly ministry has been, and remains, in the fields of education and media communication. His teaching experience includes various faculty positions in elementary, secondary, university, and professional schools. Within the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Father Maestri has served as Superintendent of Catholic Schools as well as Director of Communications. He served in both of these roles in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and during the immediate rebuilding of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. He authored The Archdiocese of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina: A Story of Hope in a Time of Destruction, published five years after the devastating storm. Read more…

Howard Margot, a native New Orleanian and curator at The Historic New Orleans Collection, was trained in French literature, linguistics, and fine arts. An aficionado of the eighteenth century, he has, since 2001, had the pleasure of working with and helping to preserve some of the city’s priceless French and Spanish colonial archives. Recent online projects on which he assisted at THNOC include the Collins C. Diboll Vieux Carré Digital Survey and A Guide to French Louisiana Manuscripts: An Expanded and Revised Edition of the 1926 Surrey Calendar with Appendices.

J.Ed. Marston, born in small town Alabama and a graduate of Spring Hill College in Mobile, currently leads communications for the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce. Marston’s novel, Kites All Quite Tall, which was co-authored with Tad Bartlett, made the short-list for the finalist in the William Faulkner – William Wisdom Novel Competition and his poem, The Limit Perfected Fish, was a finalist  in this year’s poetry competition. Read more…

Ken Mask, M.D. is author of detective fiction series including Murder at the Butt: A New Orleans Mystery, Luke Jacobs, P. I., City Park Murder: Flowers on the Tops of Trees, and e-book issues including A New Orleans Detective Mystery, The French Quarter, and most recently, Mardi Gras Madness. Positive feedback and demand from fans during extensive book touring schedules prompted the development of the first in the detective series The French Quarter into a motion picture/episodic television project which is currently in development, under contracted option by Wendell Pierce for development. Read more…

Laura Lane McNeal grew up In New Orleans where people laugh a lot, talk with their hands, love good music and good food, and will make up any excuse for a party. In 2005, when the devastation of Hurricane Katrina forced her to rebuild her life, Laura seized the opportunity to fulfill her lifetime dream of becoming a writer. She hasn’t stopped since. Laura lives in New Orleans and is married with two sons. Dollbaby is her first published novel. She is working on a new novel now. Read more…

Marylin Mell, Ph.D., coordinator of the Department of English at Dillard University in New Orleans, teaches film, poetry, novel, essay, literary criticism, and literature of major authors, and is currently working on a film theory book entitled Caught: Queens, Cinema, and the Loss of the Dialectic, a work reviewing over 250 films and exploring how the majority of films focused on queens tend to represent them as transfixed by romance rather than empowered by their political status. Read more…

Joseph Meyer, violin, is an active soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral leader who holds positions as associate concertmaster of the Charlotte Symphony, associate concertmaster of the Colorado Music Festival, and faculty member of Davidson College. Also involved in baroque performance, he is a member of the New Orleans–based Lyrica Baroque ensemble. Read more…

Morgan Molthrop, a New Orleans native, is an entrepreneur, writer and social critic. Molthrop is the leading New Orleans historical “color analyst” and is a frequent lecturer for major corporations. In partnership with Carling Dinkler III, his company provides turnkey guest “experience” solutions for clients visiting New Orleans. He is author of Artist Spaces (UL Press 2014), a book of 100 images of live/work artist studios by renowned photographer Tina Freeman. He also wrote Andrew Jackson’s Playbook: 15 Strategies for Success. This is the first book of its kind to be serialized on Facebook. Read more…

Marilyn Moriarty lives in Roanoke, Virginia, where she teaches English literature at Hollins University. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Irvine, and her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Florida. Book publications include Moses Unchained, which won the A.W.P. prize in Creative Nonfiction, and Writing Science through Critical Thinking, a textbook. Her memoir was a finalist for the 2006 A.W.P. prize in creative nonfiction, and her novel-in-progress, The Book of Rivers and Cities, was also a finalist in this year’s William Faulkner – William Wisdom writing contest. Read more…

Michael Murphy, author of the fun new book for “foodies,” Eat Dat New Orleans, has been publishing, editing, writing, and running a literary agency since 1981. His first 13 years in the business were with Random House, where he was a Vice President. Later he ran William Morrow as their Publisher. He established his own literary agency in the Fall of 2007. Recently, he has found a new career in the tourism industry of New Orleans and begun writing and selling himself as a writer. He is a graduate in English literature from Ohio Wesleyan University, Pratt School of Design, and the Publishing Program of New York University. Read more…

James Nolan’s novel Higher Ground was awarded a William Faulkner – William Wisdom Gold Medal and the 2012 Independent Publishers’ Gold Medal in Southern Fiction. Perpetual Care won the 2009 Next-Generation Indie Book Award for Best Short Story Collection. His poetry collections include the recent Drunk on Salt, as well as Why I Live in the Forest and What Moves Is Not the Wind, and he has published four books of poetry in translation, criticism, and essays. Read more…

Rosary O’Neill is the author of several books, including The Actor’s Checklist and The Director as Artist, and 21 plays, including The Awakening of Kate Chopin, Beckett at Greystones Bay, Blackjack: The Thief of Possession, and Degas in New Orleans. Her plays have been produced worldwide, and her play Uncle Victor won a signing at the Consulate General Germany in New York in 2011. Read more…

Gregory Orfalea, Ph.D. is author of the new biography of Blessed Junipero Serra, Journey to the Sun, an authoritative and incisive picture of a man whose story is as essential to the founding of our nation as the stories of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown. Dr. Orfalea was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, and educated at Georgetown University and the University of Alaska. He is the author or editor of eight books, the most recent of which are The Man Who Guarded the Bomb (2010) and Angeleno Days (2009). Read more…

 

Glen Pitre—born in Cut Off, LA, and Harvard educated—has written for Hollywood studios, broadcast networks, cable, PBS, indie productions, and foreign producers. His screenwriting has been translated into more than 30 languages, and includes dramas, comedy, thrillers, action-adventure, romance, horror, westerns, sit-coms, documentaries, sports films, environmental films, 4D museum experiences, and IMAX. Read more…

 

Lawrence N. Powell, who holds the James H. Clark Endowed Chair in American Civilization, has taught history at Tulane University since 1978. From 2000 to 2005 he was the Director of the Tulane/Xavier National Center for the Urban Community. Today he directs the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane.  His most recent book is The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Harvard, 2012). Other publications include Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana (UNC, 2000), New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Yale, 1980; Fordham, 1999), and George Washington Cable’s New Orleans (LSU Press, 2008). Read more…

 

Nitya Prema, M.A. is a passionate eco-therapist with a depth psychology perspective. She believes archetypal patterns of the psyche dwell in the lands, mountains, rivers, caves, and cities. Influencing the world consciousness, that people collectively carry and act upon what is evoked deep in their personal psyches. Nitya is a world traveler and her writings are based on what she has experienced. Her writings include Spiral Labyrinth Journey: A Pilgrimage into Sacred Space. Read more…

 

 

 

Uriel Quesada, Ph.D. is the director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Loyola University. There, he offers courses on Latin American crime literature, Central American postwar literature, Latin American urban chronicle, Border studies, and Latin American Life Writing. Read more…

Bruce Boyd Raeburn is a jazz historian. He is curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University and also serves as Director of Special Collections. Bruce is the son of the big band leader Boyd Albert Raeburn, and his mother, Ginnie Powell, was a jazz singer who performed with the big bands of Raeburn, Gene Krupa, Charlie Barnet, and Harry James. Also a writer, his latest book, New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2009. Read more…

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is a charter member of the Melanated Writers Collective and the Peauxdunque Writers’ Alliance, a multi-genre writers’ group formed under the auspices of the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society’s Words & Music Writers’ Alliance. He received the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop’s 2013 Joanna Leake Prize for Fiction Thesis for his short story collection It’s Good to See You’re Awake. Read more…

Joséphine Sacabo lives and works in New Orleans,where she has been strongly influenced by the unique ambiance of the city, and also spends time in San Miguel Allende, Mexico. She is a native of Laredo, TX, and was educated at Bard College in NY. Before moving to New Orleans, she lived and worked extensively in France and England. Her new collection of photographs, Óyeme con los Ojos (Hear Me with Your Eyes), is on exhibit at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and The Gallery of Fine Photography. Read more…

The Rev. Patrick Samway, S.J., former literary editor of America, published in New York, today divides his time between Philadelphia, PA—where he is Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University and where he held the Donald MacLean, S.J., Jesuit Chair for two years—and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where St. Joseph’s is in partnership with the Jesuit Order in a system of grammar schools, established by the Jesuits after the devastating earthquake. Read more…

Thomas Sancton grew up in New Orleans and attended local public schools. After studies at Harvard and Oxford, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar, he began a 22-year career as a writer, editor, and foreign correspondent for Time Magazine, serving most recently as Paris Bureau Chief, where his reporting earned him an Overseas Press Club Award. While living in Paris, he authored the international bestseller Death of a Princess: The Investigation and a political thriller, The Armageddon Project, set against the backdrop of the war in Iraq. His forthcoming novel, Off the Cliff, is a historical work set in Normandy under the Nazi occupation. Read more…

Jane Satterfield, who judged the 2014 Essay category of the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition, is a previous winner of the Society’s Gold Medal for Best Essay. She is author of the recently released narrative non-fiction book, Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond. A highly accomplished poet, her most recent collection is Her Familiars, published in 2013 by Elixir Press. Read more…

Mark Evan Schwartz, Associate Professor of Screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University School of Film and Television in Los Angeles, is an award-winning screenwriter with credits on over a dozen produced feature films, television shows, and TV movies. Starting out as a Production Assistant for Francis Coppola, he went on to become Story Analyst for the Geffen Company, Story Editor for Galactic Films MGM, and Head of Story and Development for Nelson Entertainment. Read more…

Richard Sexton, a native of Atlanta, GA and a resident of San Francisco, CA during the early years of his career, moved to New Orleans in 1991 and, since establishing his New Orleans photo studio, has become one of the leading art photographers in the city. Prior to his arrival in New Orleans, he had already contracted with Chronicle Books to create a book centering on an ambitious photo essay interpreting a city that many famous artists and writers had left their mark on well before him. Read more…

 

Alex Sheshunoff won the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society’s 2013 gold medal for best narrative non-fiction book for his manuscript, Paradise Misplaced. Sheshunoff was signed after winning by literary agent Jeff Kleinman, who judged the non-fiction book category. Jeff turned right around and sold this full-of-fun memoir to Tracy Bernstein, a senior editor at New American Library, an imprint of Penguin-Random House. The book is scheduled for 2015 release. Sheshunoff, Kleinman, and Bernstein are appearing together on the Words & Music, 2014 program. Read more…

 

 

Lawrence “Larry” Sieberth—pianist, composer, and music producer—is at home in any musical setting. A fluent jazz artist and synthesizer wizard, Lawrence integrates the many facets of music and performance. His own neo-bop improvisations and experimental diversions combine with his classical interests, providing an extensive musical vocabulary for his compositions for television, film, and stage. Larry’s musical background is very diverse: he is a pianist, composer, arranger, musical director, educator, and producer. Read more…

Kay Sloan grew up in south Jackson and left Mississippi for Santa Cruz, where she graduated from the University of California. Her first publication was a poem she wrote to her mother in an effort to explain how a Southern Baptist daughter could become a hippie. Southern Exposure was kind enough to print it. Sloan went on to publish two novels, Worry Beads and The Patron Saint of Red Chevys. Respectively, they received the Ohioana Award for Fiction and distinction as a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” book. Read more…

 

Julie Smith is the author of 20 novels, most of them set in New Orleans and starring one or the other of her detective heroes, an ex-debutante turned cop named Skip Langdon, and a PI named Talba Wallis. (Both female, both tough and wily.) A long-time New Orleans resident, she’s the editor of the recent acclaimed anthology, New Orleans Noir, and she’s also written numerous short stories and essays. Her novel, New Orleans Mourning, won the Edgar Allan Poe award for best novel. This well-known creator of the detectives Skip Langdon and Talba Wallace recently turned her hand to a different kind of character, an engaging one at that, a cat. He’s named A.B., advisor to budding psychic Reeno, ace teen burglar, tough and wiley like Julie’s other female protagonists, just younger. Taking a cue from all of the research for her long series of mystery novels for adults, Reeno is a well-drawn crime figure who describes her friend A. B. as the “mutant cat from Hell.” The book, Cursebusters, is a YA paranormal adventure. After editing New Orleans Noir, she created an e-publishing company, which launched in 2010 with a book by Patty Friedmann. Read more…

Rebecca Snedeker is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and writer whose work supports human rights and creative expression in her native New Orleans. Most recently, she collaborated with Rebecca Solnit and a host of contributing cartographers, writers, visual artists, and researchers to create Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (University of California Press), a brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, one that provides a vivid, complex look at the multifaceted nature of New Orleans, a city replete with contradictions. Photo of Rebecca here is by Jonathan Treviesa. Read more…

Susan Spicer began her cooking career in New Orleans as an apprentice to Chef Daniel Bonnot at the Louis XVI Restaurant in 1979. After a four-month “stage” with Chef Roland Durand (Meilleur Oeuvrier de France) at the Hotel Sofitel in Paris in 1982, she returned to New Orleans to open the 60-seat bistro Savoir Faire in the St. Charles Hotel as Chef de Cuisine. After nearly four years as chef, she formed a partnership with Regina Keever, and in the spring of 1990 opened Bayona in the French Quarter. With solid support from local diners and critics, Bayona soon earned national attention and has been featured in numerous publications. Read more…

David Spielman, born in Tulsa, OK, has lived in New Orleans for more than 40 years, since spending a year in Europe studying art and art history and graduating from Westminster College in Missouri. He has worked as an independent, freelance photographer and has traveled the world for assignments and personal creative work, visiting six of the seven continents and 49 of the 50 states. His corporate clients include both Fortune 500 companies and local and international concerns. Spielman has his gallery and darkroom in the middle of the Garden District in a century-old skating rink. Read more…

Shari Stauch is the creator of Where Writers Win, co-director of programming for Words & Music, and a partner in PubSense Summit in Charleston, SC. Stauch is a certified coach, an award-winning essayist and fiction writer, and four-time William Faulkner – William Wisdom finalist, including twice as an essay finalist. In 2010 Ms. Stauch was First Runner-up, and was First Runner-up in the novel-in-progress category in 2007 as well. She is the author of four non-fiction books and is working on completion of a novel set in her hometown, Chicago, IL. Read more…

Terri Stoor, winner of the 2011 William Faulkner-William Wisdom gold medal for the short story, is a founding member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance, the New Orleans Chapter of the Words & Music Writers Alliance. This past summer she was invited to and attended the inaugural Oxford American Summit for Ambitious Writers. Terri will read at the annual meeting of the Words & Music Writers Alliance on Thursday, November 20. Read more…

Steve Striffler, Ph.D. is the Doris Zemurray Stone Chair of Latin American Studies, Professor of Anthropology and Geography, and Director of Latin American Studies at the University of New Orleans.  Steve received his Ph.D. at the New School for Social Research and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale, UNC, and Northwestern Universities.  Dr. Striffler writes on Latin American food, labor, and politics.  His first book, In the Shadows of State and Capital, was published by Duke University Press. Read more…

Jervey Tervalon, author of the new novel Monster’s Chef, has published five previous books, including the bestselling Dead Above Ground, and Understanding This, for which he won the New Voice’s Award from Quality Paper Books. His most recent book was an anthology, The Cocaine Chronicles. He was the Remsen Bird Writer in Residence at Occidental College and a Disney Screen Writing Fellow. He is the director of the Literature for Life Project, a literary magazine and salon, and the literary director of LitFest Pasadena. Born in New Orleans, he now lives in California and teaches at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His new book, Monster’s Chef, is a very clever and suspenseful literary thriller―complete with recipes throughout. Read more…

 

 

 

José Torres-Tama, Ecuadorian-born New Orleans performance poet, is an NEA award recipient for his interdisciplinary performances and a Louisiana Theater Fellow. As a writer/poet, performance provocateur, and visual artist, he explores the underbelly of the American Dream mythology, the Latino immigrant experience, New Orleans Creole culture, and the effects of media on race relations. Read more…

Nia Terezakis, M.D., author of the beautiful new lifestyle book, Artful Feast, grew up in Montgomery, AL, the daughter of Greek immigrant parents. Family recipes and holiday entertaining were important aspects of her Greek heritage.  She graduated from her hometown’s Huntington College with a degree in art; her ever-vigilant father wouldn’t hear of her leaving home. Armed with a degree and high grades, she prepared herself for a career in interior design and teaching art. Read more…

Luis Alberto Urrea, 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph. The critically acclaimed and best-selling author of 13 books, Urrea has won numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. The Devil’s Highway, his 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. An historical novel, The Hummingbird’s Daughter tells the story of Teresa Urrea, sometimes known as the Saint of Cabora and the Mexican Joan of Arc. The book won the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and, along with The Devil’s Highway, was named a best book of the year by many publications. It has been optioned by acclaimed Mexican director Luis Mandoki for a film to star Antonio Banderas. Read more…

 M. O. Walsh,  a writer from Baton Rouge, LA, won the Faulkner Society’s 2011 Gold Medal for best Novel-in- Progress. His manuscript, Whiteflies, was selected by literary agent Jeff Kleinman of Folio Literary Management, who judged. He since has completed and sold this novel (now called My Sunshine Away) to Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam. Foreign rights have already been sold to the UK, Brazil, Israel, Italy, and the Netherlands! The book is due out in Spring, 2015. Read more…

Marjory Wentworth, Poet Laureate of South Carolina, has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize for poetry five times. Her books of poetry include Noticing Eden, Despite Gravity, and The Endless Repetition of an Ordinary Miracle. She is the co-writer with Juan Mendez of Taking a Stand: The Evolution of Human Rights, nominated for 2013 WOLA (Washington Office on Latin America)/Duke Human Rights Book Award,  and the 2011 SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) award (category-nonfiction). Read more…

Lawrence Wells had his first novel, Rommel and the Rebel, published by Doubleday and Company in 1986. He studied writing under Hudson Strode at the University of Alabama and Evans Harrington at the University of Mississippi. Wells has written three novels and edited six non-fiction books including William Faulkner: The Cofield Collection. With his wife Dean Faulkner Wells (1936-2011), he operated Yoknapatawpha Press, an independent press in Oxford, MS, and co-published a quarterly journal, The Faulkner Newsletter. Read more…

N. West Moss is a writer and a teacher with ties to New Orleans. Her whole family is buried up in Metairie Cemetery, and she’s hoping to return to New Orleans to live at some point in the future, before she ends up in Metairie with the rest of her ancestors. Her winning story, Omeer’s Mangoes, is part of a collection of short stories set in Bryant Park in New York City. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Hospital Drive, the Westchester Review, The Blotter, Okra and elsewhere. Read more…

Andy Young, New Orleans poet, essayist, and author of the new book, All Night It Is Morning, grew up in southern West Virginia and has spent most of her adult life in New Orleans working at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. With her partner, Khaled Hegazzi, she translates poetry from the Arabic and founded Meena, a bilingual literary journal. Read more…