Words & Music 2012: Fabulous Faculty!

Many of the nation's best-known, most-admired, best-loved authors will be in The Big Easy for Words & Music, 2011. Take a closer look at our faculty and you will be convinced that an
unforgettable experience awaits you in New Orleans.

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of 23 books, about a wide range of things, from the first woman president of the United States to what barnyard animals are thinking.  The most recent, Alphabetter Juice (Farrar, Straus), released this year, is a sequel to his popular dictionary Alphabet Juice, now out in paperback and also available as an audiobook. Hail, Hail, Euphoria! -- The Marx Brothers in Duck Soup was his book of the year in 2010 and Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South (Knopf), won the 2007 nonfiction award from the New England Independent Booksellers Association; and AudioFile chose the audio version (HighBridge) as one of the year's top five books read by their authors. The book before that one, Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans, "delivers the goods," according to The New York Times: "a wild, unpredictable ramble through a wild, unpredictable town." He is a panelist on NPR's Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me, the president of the Authors Guild, a member of PEN and the Fellowship of Southern Authors, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, a Boston Public Library Literary Light, a usage consultant to the American Heritage Dictionary, and an original member of the Rock Bottom Remainders. He comes from Decatur, GA and lives in western Massachusetts. In 2010 he received the Thomas Wolfe Award from the University of North Carolina. Earlier, Roy received the Faulkner Society's ALIHOT (A Legend in His Own Time) Award for Literature. For more on Roy and his impressive body of work, Click Here!

Robert Olen Butler has published twelve novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell and A Small Hotel (2011)—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway. His works have been translated into nineteen languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, and Greek. He was also a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Over the past 15 years he has lectured in universities, appeared at conferences, and met with writers groups in 17 countries as a Literary Envoy for the U. S. State Department. Bob is a recipient of the Faulkner Society's annual ALIHOT (A Legend in His Own Time) Award for Literature. For more on Robert Olen Butler and his work, including praise for his new novel, A Small Hotel, Click Here!

Lori Marie Carlson is an author, editor, translator and teacher who has worked to bring Latino literature to an American audience. These four disciplines have been the lens in which she perceives the world and also the vehicles in which she shares her vision of the world. She is the author of two novels, The Sunday Tertulia and The Flamboyant, that explore the roles of women in society and the quest for love and meaningful expression, as well as the mysterious process of artistic creation. Her extensive body of work including her novels, bilingual poetry, short stories,  and young adult and children’s books have allowed her readers to share in her unique vision, one that wades through the many varied cultures in America and surfaces with stories to tell of all that is beautiful and profound within such diversity. Among the numerous anthologies of ethnic work she has translated is Burnt Sugar, a collection of contemporary Cuban poetry, a book she co-authored with her husband, Oscar Hijuelos. Photo by Marion Ettlinger.

Tom Carson, author of the new novel Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter, also is the author of Gilligan’s Wake, a New York Times Notable Book of The Year for 2003. Currently GQ’s “The Critic,” he won two National Magazine Awards for criticism as Esquire magazine’s “Screen” columnist and has been nominated two more times since then. He also won the CRMA criticism award for his book reviews in Los Angeles magazine. Before that, he wrote extensively about pop culture and politics for the LA Weekly and the Village Voice, including an obituary for Richard Nixon in the latter that the late Norman Mailer termed “brilliant.” He has contributed over the years to publications ranging from Rolling Stone to the Atlantic Monthly. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Black Clock. His verse and other random writings can be found at tomcarson.net. In 1979, he was the youngest contributor — with an essay on the Ramones — to Greil Marcus’s celebrated rock anthology, Stranded. With Kit Rachlis and Jeff Salamon, he edited Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough: Essays In Honor of Robert Christgau in 2002. Born in Germany in 1956, he grew up largely abroad “at the hands of the U.S. State Department.” He graduated in 1977 from Princeton University, where he won the Samuel Shellabarger award for creative writing. A former resident of Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles, he now lives in New Orleans with his wife, Arion Berger, and can be found all too often at Buffa’s Lounge on Saints’ days. For more on Carson and his new novel, Click Here! Photo here by Victoria F.Gaità

Andrei Codrescu (codrescu.com) was born in Sibiu, Transylvania,  Romania. His first book was License to Carry a Gun (1970). Most recent are Whatever Gets You Through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments (2011), The Poetry Lesson (2010), and The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, (2009). Codrescu founded founded Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books & Ideas, 1983-2011 (corpse.org), and taught literature and poetry at Johns Hopkins University, University of Baltimore,  and Louisiana State University. In 1989 he covered the fall of the Ceausescu regime for NPR and ABC News, and wrote The Hole in the Flag: an Exile's Story of Return and Revolution. He is a regular commentator on NPR's All Things Considered, and received a Peabody Award for the film Road Scholar. A longtime French Quarter resident, Andrei has collected his writing about the city in New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City (Algonquin). He now divides his time between the French Quarter and the Buffalo River National Park wilderness in Arkansas. For more on Andrei and his work, Click Here! Photograph of Andrei by David Gallent.

Moira Crone has published one novel and three books of stories, most recently, What Gets Into Us.  Recent works of hers appear in Oxford American, Triquarterly, Habitus, and New Orleans Review. She has won the Faulkner -Wisdom Gold Medal for Best Novella  and the Gold medal for Best Short Story awarded bythe Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society.  Her stories have been selected for the award anthology, New Stories From The South, five times.  In 2009 she was awarded the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction from the Southern Fellowship of Writers for the body of her work. Her latest novel, The Not Yet, is due out for spring, 2012. Moira also is an accomplished fine artist, who paints under the name "Mo Lion." 
Some of her work currently is on exhibit at the Crescent City BrewHouse, 527 Decatur St.and can also be seen on her facebook: www.facebook.com/molionart. For more information on Moira and her work, including a description of and advance praise for her new novel, The Not Yet, which is creating quite a buzz, Click Here!

Nilo Cruz was born in Cuba in 1960. During his early childhood, his father, who was a staunch opponent of the communist government, was imprisoned for trying to flee the country. After his father completed his sentence, when Nilo was nine years old, the family immigrated to the United States and took up residency in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami. He began exploring his interest in theater by acting and directing in the early 1980’s. Before moving to New York City, he studied theater at Miami Dade Community College. In New York, he met fellow Cuban Marìa Irene Fornès, who recommended him to an instructor at Brown University. Eventually he attended Brown and earned his MFA in 1994. He returned to Florida in 2001 and was appointed as the playwright-in-residence for the New Theatre in Coral Gables. In 2002, he wrote his most famous work, Anna in the Tropics. This work was a great success and performed in theaters across the country. After learning that he had won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Cruz said, “By honoring my play Anna in the Tropics, the first Latino play to earn the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, the Pulitzer Prize Board is not only embracing my work as an artist, but is actually acknowledging and securing a place for Latino plays in the North American theater." After winning this award, Anna  in the Tropics opened on Broadway with continuing success and was even nominated for a Tony Award in 2004. In addition to writing  plays, Cruz has taught drama at many universities, including Brown, Yale, and the University of Iowa. Through his work, Cruz has become one of the most revered  playwrights of our time. His introduction of Latino themed plays into mainstream American theater has set the stage for playwrights and authors to come. For more on Cruz and his work, Click Here!

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 25 years in Savannah, Atlanta, Charleston, and other cities (including New Orleans), as well as in Europe. Her first book on Zona Rosa, The Woman Who Spilled Words All Over Herself: Writing and Living the Zona Rosa Way, was published by Faber & Faber in 1997. Daniell's revolutionary memoir, Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex and Suicide in the Deep South (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980; Henry Holt & Company, 1989; Hill Street Press, 1999) won the 1999 Palimpsest Prize for a most-requested out-of-print book, and was re-issued that year. Along with her second memoir, Sleeping with Soldiers (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984), Fatal Flowers was a forerunner of the current memoir trend. She is the author of four other books of poetry and prose. Among her many awards are two N.E.A. Fellowships in creative writing, one in in poetry, another in fiction. For more on Ms. Daniell and her work, Click Here!

Rosemary James, shown here at the Society's annual Carnival ball, staged by the Krewe of Libris, has had a dual career in communications and interior design. As a journalist, she started her career writing features for The Charleston News & Courier/Evening Post in her hometown. Her career in New Orleans began in 1964 with the States-Item, where she first covered the maritime and oil and gas industries, then was assigned to cover the courts and politics. With two other reporters at the States-Item, she broke the story that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and his subsequent arrest of businessman Clay Shaw. In 1968 she moved to WWL-TV, where she again covered primarily the courts and politics, including the six-week trial of Clay Shaw, indicted for conspiracy to murder the President. In advance of the trial she co-authored the non-fiction book, Plot or Politics? centering on the investigation. Plot or Politics? was published in 1968 and remains in print. Her political coverage included the administrations of Mayors Victor Schiro and Moon Landrieu and Governors John McKeithen and Edwin Edwards. More recently, she edited a collection of essays in the immediate aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy by Her Sons, Daughters, and Lovers, published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which also remains in print. Concurrently James has owned her own interior design business for 23 years.  Recent projects have included renovation and decoration of an Atlanta residence for novelist Elizabeth Dewberry, renovation and decoration of the French Quarter residence which once was the home of the Mayor of Storyville, and the uptown residence of a prominent surgeon and concert pianist. She has been a frequent contributor to design magazines, such as Southern Accents, Traditional Home, Creative Life, Departures, and Decorating. Her own design work has been featured in Southern Accents, Departures, The New York Times, Traditional Home, Creative Life, Decorating, Metropolitan Home and other journals. A Carolina native, Ms. James has lived and worked in New Orleans since 1964. With her husband, Joseph DeSalvo, Jr., and W. Kenneth Holditch, she is co-founder of the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society and the creator of Words & Music: a Literary Feast in New Orleans. The DeSalvos are recipients of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.

Rodger Kamenetz, poet, essayist, non-fiction author, teacher, and popular lecturer, will judge the poetry category of the 2011 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. 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. Since this non-fiction work was published Rodger has continued his research and, during Words & Music, he will address The Importance of Last Night's Dreams in the Global Village. Kamenetz is the bestselling author of The Jew in the Lotus, his journey through Bhuddism to recover his faith as a Jew, including lengthy interview sessions with the Dali Llama, Stalking Ellijah, and Terra Infirma, a brilliant memoir about the author's relationship with his mother in his dreams after her death. Last year, he published the non-fiction work, Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman Of Bratslav and Franz Kafka, the links between two incredible storytellers. For more on Rodger and his work Click Here!

Andrew Lam is a writer and a co-founder of New America Media, an association of over 2000 ethnic media organizations in America. His book, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora won the Pen American Beyond the Margins Award in 2006, and was short-listed for the Asian American Literature Award. His book, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, was published in October 2010 and listed in the top ten indie books by Shelf Unbound Magazine. His collection of short stories, Birds of Paradise, is due out in 2012 and, currently, he is working on a novel. Lam, born in Vietnam, came to the US in 1975 when he was 11 years old. He was featured in the documentary My Journey Home, aired on PBS nationwide in 2004, in which a film crew followed him back to his homeland Vietnam. In 2010 he co-produced a segment for the Jim Lehrer News Hour on Vietnamese Americans in Vietnam. He has a Master in Fine Arts from San Francisco State University in creative writing, and a BA degree in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. For more on this remarkable young man and his work, Click Here!. One of the most popular presenters at Words & Music, 2011, Andrew is judging the 2012 Essay Category of the William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition and will also be a presenter during
Words & Music, 2012.

Irvin Mayfield will tell you “Jazz is to New Orleans what oil is to Saudi Arabia,” when he explains the prolific jazz history of New Orleans. Underlying this response is Mayfield’s belief that his immense musical talent comes from being a child, not just from, but of New Orleans—a place where preservation meets passion and diversity creates culture, a place of souls and senses. In his new memoir, A Love Letter to New Orleans, a richly illustrated book and accompanying CD, Mayfield reflects on his music, unveiling the many influences that transformed him from just another talented New Orleans kid to one of the most promising young trumpeters of his generation. In this rare glimpse into the evolution of a jazz artist, Mayfield shares the inspirations that led him to create the songs on his ten albums, released by Basin Street Records. And the songs, in turn, cemented his career and life in jazz. In this very personal book, Mayfield writes of many who shaped his life, from the quiet influence of his father Irvin Mayfield Sr., a postal worker and former trumpet player who harbored dreams of a musical career, to the lasting impact of his teacher Ellis Marsalis, the patriarch of the Marsalis family. Mayfield shares the profound impact that the Mardi Gras Indian culture, George Porter Jr. of the Funky Meters, and James Booker had on his music. He writes of the creative genius and sheer integrity demonstrated by musicians like Bill Summers, Kermit Ruffins, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, Rebirth Brass Band, Horacio “El Negro’ Hernandez, and Cyril Neville. For more on Irvin and his work, visit his web site: http://irvinmayfield.com/

Laura Mullen is a Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Louisiana State University. She is the author of four collections of poetry: The Surface, After I Was Dead, Subject, and Dark Archive (University of California Press, 2011.
She also is the author of two hybrid texts, The Tales of Horror and Murmur. Recognitions for her poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, and she has been awarded a Board of Regents ATLAS grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. She has had several MacDowell Fellowships and is a frequent visitor at the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Her work has been widely anthologized and is included in American Hybrid (Norton). Recent prose has been collected in Civil Disobediences: Poetics & Politics in Action, and published in Ploughshares and The Fairytale Review. The composer Jason Eckardt’s setting of The Distance (This) from Subject premiered in New York and Helsinki and is July, 2011 release for Mode Records. New work is out or forthcoming in Action Yes!, Cerise Press, Ghost Town, the Denver Quarterly,Viz Arts, and New American Writing. Mullen was invited to participate in the Taipei International Poetry Festival in 2009 and she is the special interest delegate in Creative Writing for the Modern Language Association for 2012-2014. Ms. Mullen will judge the poetry category of the William Faulkner -
William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition in 2012.

Javier Olondo, born in Houston, TX, began his musical studies with Rosa Puertas in Barcelona, Spain in 1977. In 1980 he moved to Havana, Cuba where he continued guitar studies at the Conservatory Manuel Saumell. At the age of 13, he debuted as a soloist in Havana’s First International Guitar Festival. In 1988 he graduated top of his class from the Escuela Nacional de Musica and was the recipient of the Titulo de Oro (Golden Title Award). Upon completion of higher level studies in 1991 from Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, he followed an intense schedule of European concerts and won a scholarship to Hochscule Fur Musik and Darstellende Kunst Monzarteum, in Salzburg, Austria. There he studied guitar under Eliot Fisk, Joaquin Clerch, and harpsichordist Anthony Spiri, earning a Magister in Arts specializing in guitar. Other teachers include: Manuel Barrueco, David Rusell, Flavio Cucci, and Wolfgang Lendle. Olondo belongs to musical ensembles trio Sekwenza, Barcelona Nova Musica , La Renaissance, and duo Cervantes. He is music professor at Cervantes Hispanic School for the Arts, Tulane University, and Concordia University of New Orleans, and teaches at the Escola Professional de Musica Alois Haba in Barcelona, Spain during the summer. In addition to various composers dedicating works to his, he has recorded three critically acclaimed albums and he continues to perform in festivals and concerts throughout Europe and the Americas. On the more relaxed side of his musical career, Javier Olondo, leads the band AsheSon, specializing in Cuban salsa and he dances and teaches salsa. To hear his classical sound, visit: http://www.myspace.com/javierolondomusic. To watch him social dancing, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LECUwJaomVE.

Rosary Hartel O'Neill is the author of 21 plays, most published bySamuel French, Inc. Many have been produced internationally by invitation of the American embassies in Paris, Bonn, Tibilisi, Budapest, London, and Moscow. In 2010 and 2011 she won fellowships to the Norman Mailer Institute for her play Marilyn/God and two others to the HamnerTheatre (formerly the Shenandoah Playwrights Festival) for her James Dean and the Devil. Her play Uncle Victor won a signing at the ConsulateGeneral of the Federal Republic in Germany in New York in 2011. Marilyn/God was presented by Southern Rep in New Orleans in January, 2012 in concert with a fundraising event for the theatre honoring Ms. O’Neill. She has been playwright-in-residence at the Sorbonne University, Paris; Tulane University, New Orleans; Defiance College, Ohio, and the University of Bonn, Germany, and Visiting Scholar at Cornell University. Her acting text, The Actor’s Checklist, is used worldwide and is in its fourth edition with Wadsworth Publishers. Before moving to New York, Ms. O’Neill, who grew up in New Orleans, taught drama at Loyola University of the South and founded Southern Repertory Theater. She was artistic director at this successful theatre from 1987 to 2002. For more on this distinguished artist and her honors, including two Fulbrights, Click Here!

Uriel Quesada, Ph.D. is the director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Loyola University which offers courses on Latin American crime literature, Central American postwar literature, Latin American urban chronicle, Border studies, and Latin American Life Writing. As a scholar, Dr. Quesada has written about Central American detective fiction, Latin American masculinities and travel writing. In 2009 he co-edited a special issue of the academic journal Istmo devoted to the study of gender and sexualities in contemporary Central American literature. A fiction writer himself, Dr. Quesada has published seven books, including El atardecer de los niños (short stories, 1990; Editorial Costa Rica Award and Costa Rica National Book Award 1990), Lejos, tan lejos (short stories, Áncora Award in Literature, 2005), El gato de sí mismo (novel, Costa Rica National Book Award 2006) and Viajero que huye (short stories, 2008).  

Brad Richard’s second collection of poems, Motion Studies, won the 2010 Washington Prize from The Word Works and was published in 2011. He is also the author of Habitations (Portals Press, New Orleans, 2000), and his poems and reviews have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Assembly, Barrow Street, Guernica, Iowa Review, Literary Imagination, Mississippi Review, New Orleans Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. Winner of the 2002 Writers Exchange competition in poetry from Poets & Writers, Inc., and recipient of fellowships from the Surdna Foundation and the Louisiana division of the arts, he has received residencies at the Ragdale Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center. Formerly with New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, Riverfront, he is now chair of the creative writing program at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans. For more about Brad and his work, Click Here!

George Rodrigue, born and raised in New Iberia, LA, is best known for his Blue Dog paintings, which catapulted him to worldwide fame in the early 1990s. His art studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette followed by the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA gave him a foundation that has spawned one of the greatest success stories in southern art. Rodrigue and his art have been the subject of 12 books, published nationally and internationally, as well as numerous museum exhibitions, including 40-year career retrospectives at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens Museum in Memphis, TN (2007) and the New Orleans Museum of Art (2008), both of which broke all attendance records for living artists or contemporary shows. The artist began painting in the third grade while bedridden with polio. He already had won statewide acclaim for his rich portrayals of the landscape and people of South Louisiana when his Blue Dog transformed the image of the original Cajun werewolf dog or the loup-garou into an international pop icon. Rodrigue exhibits his original paintings and silkscreens in his own galleries in Carmel, CA and New Orleans, where, after 20 years in the same location, he recently purchased and renovated a 200 year old building adjacent to St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter, providing him with more than 4,000 square feet of exhibition space. Through the George Rodrigue Foundation of the Arts, Rodrigue raised $2.5 million benefiting post-Katrina New Orleans through sales of his relief prints, and in 2010 he held his first statewide art contest for seniors in the state of Louisiana, attracting four hundred applicants and granting scholarships, art supplies, and other assistance. For more information on the art of George Rodrigue, including recent work, visit www.georgerodrigue.com.

Joséphine Sacabo lives and works in New Orleans,where she has been strongly influenced by the unique ambience of the city, and also 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 earlier work was in the photo-journalisitic tradition, influenced by Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She now works in a very subjective, introspective style, using poetry as the genesis of her work. Her most important influences include Rilke, Baudelaire, Pedro Salinas, Vincente Huiobro, Juan Rulfo, Mallarmé, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Sacabo, has published four books of her work including Une Femme Habitée in Paris in 1991 (Editions Marval); award winning Pedro Paramo in 2002 (University of Texas Press); Cante Jondo in 2002 and Duino Elegie in 2005 (both 21st Publishing). Sacabo has shown solo in Paris, London, Madrid, Toulouse, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major U.S. cities. Her work has been widely published in magazines in the U.S. and Europe and is collected by museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art - N.Y.; Smithsonian - Washington D.C.; and Library of Congress. Joséphine Sacabo has taught highly acclaimed workshops at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles - France and at the Santa Fe Workshops. 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. For more on Joséphine and her work, Click Here!

Amy Serrano, Chairman of the new Pan American Connections Committee of the Faulkner Society is a New Orleans based, award-winning documentary filmmaker, whose film, The Sugar Babies, about Haitian children abducted by sugar companies for use as slave labor in the sugar industry across the border in the Dominican Republic, was screened at Words & Music in 2007. Amy also is a published poet, public speaker, and respected human rights activist who currently is working on her first book,  This is Who We Are. She also serves on the Advisory Council of the Faulkner Society and heads Amy Serrano & Associates | Creative Media, Communications and Consulting. For more on Amy and her work as a writer and filmmaker, Click Here!. For mor on her consulting business, visit: www.amyserrano.com

Julie Smith, the well-known creator of the dectectives Skip Langdon and Talba Wallace in her mystery series which includes the Edgar-winning New Orleans Mourning, is now turning 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 resarch 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, a YA paranormal adventure, was released this summer. After editing a successful anthology by New Orleans authors, New Orleans Noir, she created an e-publishing company, launched in 2010 with a book by Patty Friedmann, and will have published 11 by the end of the year. Julie, who also has been a writing coach, is author of Writing Your Way, a no-nonsense, jam-packed book on writing fiction. The book came directly out of the author’s belief that most teachers need to cut their students a little slack and help them find their own writing method. As a result of her own explorations for e-publishing, she has posted a blog dealing with The Secret i-Book Strategy.  “Here’s the great thing about i-Books,” says Julie, “you can actually watch little movies in your book—right on your iPad or phone–like Harry Potter and his buddies did in the Hogwarts library. The pages turn just like real ones.” Find out more about Julie and her work at: http//www.booksBnimble.com, http://cursebustersbook.com/, and http://www.casamysterioso.com. She also blogs, Facebooks, and she, we assume, tweets up a storm, a totally modern Millie of a writer!

Shari Stauch has been involved in publishing, marketing and PR for 30 years. She is the co-creator of Pool & Billiard Magazine, celebrating 27 years as the sport’s oldest monthly magazine. In 2004 she retired from the Women’s Pro Billiard Tour after a 20 year career as a top player and marketer/co-creator of the tour (inducted into the WPBA Hall of Fame in 2007) to pursue development of Shark Marketing Co. and serve a growing community of writers and authors. Stauch and fellow author Brenda McClain produced the South Carolina Writer’s Conference in 2004, setting new attendance/income records. As an executive board member of Charleston, South Carolina’s Center for Women, she heads the Center’s Women's Writer Series. In 2008, Stauch signed on as Co-Director of Programming for Words & Music: A Literary Feast in New Orleans, and worked with team member Kendra Haskins to re-launch the organization’s website. Stauch continues to work with the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society as well as with agents, editors, writers and aspiring authors throughout the U.S., using her marketing and PR talents to help authors broaden their audiences. Stauch is a certified coach, an award-winning essayist and fiction writer, and four-time Faulkner-Wisdom finalist, including twice as an Essay finalist. In 2010 Ms. Stauch was First Runner-up in 2010. She 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. For more on Shari, Click Here!

Mark Yakich's first novel, A Meaning for Wife, will be released concurrent with Words & Music 2011. Mark is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (a winner of the National Poetry Series, Penguin, 2004), The Making of Collateral Beauty (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo 2006), and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (Penguin Poets, 2008). He is an associate professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. A Meaning for Wife is the story of a man trying to come to terms with the sudden death of his wife, the aging parents he has long avoided, and the tribulations of single parenthood. For more on Mark and his novel, Click Here! Or, visit his website his www.markyakich.com.