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.
Uriel Quesada, Ph.D. is the director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Loyola University.
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.
J.Ed. Marston, born in small town Alabama and a graduate of Spring Hill College in Mobile, has worked as a public defense paralegal, a small town newspaper reporter, the manager of a non-profit serving homeless people, and currently leads communications for the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce.
Gary Krist wrote three novels—Bad Chemistry, Chaos Theory, and Extravagance—and two short story collections—The Garden State and Bone by Bone—before turning to narrative nonfiction before turning to narrative nonfiction with The White Cascade and his latest book, the New York Times Bestseller, City of Scoundrels, the city in this case being Chicago, that most American of American cities.
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.
Rosemary James has had a dual career in communications and interior design. As a journalist, she started her career writing features as a high school student writing for the Pulitzer Prize wining weekly, the Myrtle Beach Sun, and then for The Charleston News & Courier/Evening Post in her hometown.
W. Kenneth Holditch, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Literature and Writing at the University of New Orleans, is a co-founder of The Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society and was one of the founders of the Tennessee Williams Festivals in New Orleans, Clarksdale, Mississippi, and Columbus, MS.
Robert Hicks, New York Times bestselling author of The Widow of the South and
A Separate Country is the very image of a man who has turned a personal passion into an entire new career a a fiction writer.
Leopold (Lee) Froehlich is managing editor of Playboy, and has worked with everyone from T.C. Boyle to Liesl Schillinger over the years. Froehlich recently completed editing the six-volume 3,600-page Hugh Hefner’s Playboy for Taschen. Among his feature stories about New Orleans for the magazine is Venus on the Half Shell on the inimitable Louisiana oyster.