James Nolan, a fifth-generation New Orleans native, is a widely published fiction writer, poet, essayist, and translator. His 11th book is Flight Risk: Memoirs of a New Orleans Bad Boy, out this year with the University Press of Mississippi. Other recent books include You Don’t Know Me: New and Selected Stories (winner of the 2015 Independent Publishers Gold Medal in Southern Fiction), the novel Higher Ground (awarded a Faulkner/Wisdom Gold Medal), and Perpetual Care (selected as the 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Best Short Story Collection). He has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two Fulbright fellowships, and has taught literature and creative writing at universities in San Francisco, Florida, Barcelona, Madrid, and Beijing. More recently he was Writer-in-Residence at both Tulane and Loyola universities in New Orleans. Currently, he tutors developing writers.