T. J. Johnson, Popular host of a contemporary jazz show, will discuss his book,
New Orleans: A Writer’s City, at Faulkner for All, 2026.
T. R. Johnson grew up in Louisville, went to college in Chicago and Virginia, and taught for a few years in Boston, then moved to New Orleans in 1999. Since 2001, he has hosted a contemporary jazz radio program at WWOZ 90.7 FM. He is a Professor of English and Weiss Presidential Fellow at Tulane University. He has written books about prose style and psychoanalysis and recently edited for Cambridge University Press a collection of 26 essays called New Orleans: A Literary History. A few years later, in 2023, Cambridge published his New Orleans: A Writer’s City. In late summer of 2026, a new collection of essays, co-edited with Matthew Paul Smith, will arrive, called The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New Orleans. Currently, T. R. is studying toward certification as a Louisiana Master Naturalist. The rest of the time, he swims, gardens, practices his saxophone.
Reviews: New Orleans: A Writer’s City
Dazzling in depth and breadth, this book sings with the voices of those who have been moved to create art about New Orleans, from Walt Whitman to Zora Neale Hurston to Beyonce to Maurice Carlos Ruffin. An outstanding endeavor, for anyone who loves New Orleans, anyone who loves literature, and of course, for anyone who loves both.
— Jesmyn Ward, two-time winner of the National Book Award.
A thoughtful, comprehensive stations-of-the-cross journey through the literary history and traditions of a city that has done more, pound for pound, to create our American culture than any other. If you love New Orleans, you need this compendium in your library. If you don’t love New Orleans, there is something wrong with you and this volume is as valuable a medicinal as a Wild Tchoupitoulas album, a Zulu golden coconut or the middle section of the menu at Mosca’s.’
—David Simon, Creator of The Wire and Tremé