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. Maurice’s essay, Beginning of This Road, appears in Rebecca Solnit’s Unfathomable City, a collection of maps and non-fiction about post-Katrina New Orleans published by the University of California Press. He will read an excerpt from a new piece of fiction at the annual meeting of the Words & Music Writers Alliance on December 4 at The Presbytere, Jackson Square.