Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society: Words & Music Faculty

Claire Applewhite, a St. Louis native, published her first mystery novel, The Wrong Side of Memphis in May. Applewhite creates a story as memorable as the classic Clue board game we all used to play as kids. Claire is a freelance journalist, speechwriter, novelist, and writing competition judge. Her work includes mystery novels, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches and eulogies. The Wrong Side of Memphis has enjoyed favorable reviews. Kirkus Reviews, for instance, had this to say about the book: Applewhite writes with a keen eye fr setting and an ear for punchy dialogue. She does a fine job of fleshing out The Jewel Arms' (an apartment building where murders are beginning to outnumber residents) tawdry milieu and peopling it with vivid but believable lowlifes...An entertaining and atmospheric read.

Nevada Barr was born on March 1, 1952 in the small western town of Yerington, NV and raised on a mountain airport in the Sierras. Both her parents were pilots and mechanics and her sister, Molly, continued the tradition by becoming a pilot for US Air. Pushed out of the nest, Nevada fell into the theatre, receiving her BA in speech and drama and her MFA in acting before making the pilgrimage to New York City, then Minneapolis. For 18 years she worked on stage, in commercials, industrial training films and did voice-overs for radio. During this time she became interested in the environmental movement and began working in the National Parks during the summers -- Isle Royale in Michigan, Guadalupe Mountains in Texas, Mesa Verde in Colorado, and then on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi. Woven throughout these seemingly disparate careers was the written word. Nevada wrote and

presented campfire stories, taught storytelling and was a travel writer and restaurant critic. Her first novel, Bitterweet was published in 1983. The Anna Pigeon series, featuring a female park ranger as the protagonist, started when she married her love of writing with her love of the wilderness, the summer she worked in west Texas. The first book, Track of the Cat, was brought to light in 1993 and won both the Agatha and Anthony awards for best first mystery. The series was well received and A Superior Death, loosely based on Nevada's experiences as a boat patrol ranger on Isle Royale in Lake Superior, was published in 1994. In 1995 Ill Wind came out. It was set in Mesa Verde, Colorado where Nevada worked as a law enforcement ranger for two seasons. n the years since, 11 more Anna Pigeon novels have been published, eight of them New York Times best sellers. Her most recent novel, 13 1/2, a stand-alone psychological thriller, arrived in bookstores in September and also hit the New York Times Best Seller List. In addition to the Agatha and Anthony Awards, Ms. Barr has been nominated for the Edgar Award.
Ten years ago Nevada began painting as an antidote to words. Since, she has had two one-woman shows and several shared with other artists. Her work is shown at The Great Artists Collective on Royal Street in New Orleans. Nevada paints cats and New Orleans’ nightscapes with women in evening gowns carrying guns. Nevada lives in New Orleans with her husband, four cats and two dogs.

John Biguenet is the author of Oyster, a novel, and The Torturer's Apprentice: Stories, published by Ecco/HarperCollins in the U.S. and by Orion Books in the U.K. His fiction is

published in Hebrew translation by Matar Publishing Company in Tel Aviv, in French translation by Éditions Albin Michel in Paris, and in Dutch translation by Uitgeverij Ailantus in Amsterdam. Among his other books are Foreign Fictions (Random House), two volumes on literary translation (The University of Chicago Press), and Strange Harbors, an anthology of international literature in translation (Center for the Art of Translation). Biguenet’s radio play Wundmale, which premiered on Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Germany's largest radio network, was rebroadcast by Österreichischer Rundfunk, the Austrian national radio and television network. Two of his stories have been featured in Selected Shorts at Symphony Space on Broadway. The Vulgar Soul won the 2004 Southern New Plays Festival and was a featured production in 2005 at Southern Rep Theatre; he and the play were profiled in American Theatre magazine. Rising Water was the winner of the 2006 National New Play Network Commission Award, a 2006 National Showcase of New Plays selection, and a 2007 recipient of an Access to Artistic Excellence development and production grant from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the 2008 Big Easy Theatre Award for Best Original Play; it has had seven productions around the country. Shotgun, the second play in his Rising Water cycle, premiered in 2009 at Southern Rep Theatre; it has won a 2009 National New Play Network Continued Life of New Plays Fund Award and is a 2009 recipient of an Access to Artistic Excellence development and production grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Productions are scheduled in 2010 at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater and Florida Studio Theatre. He was awarded a 2007 Marquette Fellowship for the writing of Night Train, which he then developed on a Studio Attachment at the National Theatre in London. Biguenet was named 2008 Theatre Person of the Year at the Big Easy Theatre Awards. His work has received an O. Henry Award and a Harper's Magazine Writing Award among other distinctions, and his stories and essays have been reprinted or cited in The Best American Mystery Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Best American Short Stories, and Best Music Writing. Having served twice as president of the American Literary Translators Association and as writer-in-residence at various universities, he is currently the Robert Hunter Distinguished University Professor at Loyola University in New Orleans. Named its first guest columnist by The New York Times, Biguenet has chronicled in both columns and videos his return to New Orleans after its catastrophic flooding and the efforts to rebuild the city <http://biguenet.blogs.nytimes.com/.

Roy Blount Jr., whose new book is Alphabet Juice, has had 21 books published, including If Only You Knew How Much I Smell You: True Portraits of Dogs and Be Sweet, a memoir. And he has another in the hopper ready for publication early next year. He has written the foreword and afterword for A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage, a previously unpublished story by Mark Twain, and a biography, Robert E. Lee, part of the Penquin Biography series. His most recent books are two collections of essays, Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans and Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South. Blount wrote the epilogue for the recent collection of essays, My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy by her Sons, Daughters, and Lovers. A contributing editor to Atlantic Monthly and a regular columnist for The Oxford American, he writes for Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, USA Today, and Esquire. For more info on Roy, visit www.royblountjr.com

Robert Olen Butler won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which was also short-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1993 and won the Hilda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Pulitzer led to a Guggenheim grant. Butler's works of fiction include Tabloid Dreams, They Whisper, On Distant Ground, Fair Warning, Mr. Spaceman, Had a Good Time, a collection of prose poems, Severance, and his new collection of short short fiction, Intercourse. His non-fiction includes From Where We Dream. His most recent release is a novel, Hell, a noir look at cinema noir. Butler also is a professional screenwriter for films and television. He teaches at the University of Florida in Tallahassee.

Peter Cooley is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University. He has a B.A. in Humanities from Shimer College, an M.A. in Art and Literature from The University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Modern Letters from The University of Iowa, where he was a student i

n the Writers’ Workshop. His eight books of poetry are The Company of Strangers, The Room Where Summer Ends, Nightseasons, The Van Gogh Notebook, The Astonished Hours, Sacred Conversations, and A Place Made of Starlight. Carnegie Mellon, his publisher, just released his new volume Divine Margins. Hispoems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic and in over one hundred anthologies including most recently The Best American Poetry, 2002, The Manthology, Poets on Place and Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website. From 1970-2000 he was Poetry Editor of The North American Review. His particular interests are creative writing, women poets and contemporary literature. In addition to workshops in creative writing, he has taught Surrealism in Contemporary Poetry, Confessional Poets and Poetics for Poets. Peter has given recent poetry readings of his own work on the Ohio Poetry Circuit, in Spain and France, in New Zealand, where he was the U.S. Representative to the International Poetry Festival, in the Czech Republic, and in Cape Town, South Africa. He received the Inspirational Professor Award in 2001 and the Newcomb Professor of the Year Award. in 2003.

Moira Crone is author of the novel, A Period of Confinement, and three collections of stories, The Winnebago Mysteries, Dream State, and most recently, What Gets Into Us. Her work has appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, Gettysburg Review, and Mademoiselle, and twice in the anthology Best New Stories from the South. Crone teaches in the graduate creative writing program at LSU. She won the Society's 1993 gold medal award for her short story Dream State, which became the centerpiece o

f her collection by the same title. She also won the gold medal for Best Novella in 2004 for Ice Garden, which became the centerpiece of her collection of short fiction, recently published by the University Press of Mississippi, What Gets Into Us. Since publication, she has expanded Ice Garden to a full-length novel. Here's what one of the South's best writers, Doris Betts, has to say about this book: Fayton, N.C., has here its own Sherwood Anderson as Crone interweaves four decades of a town's dreams and secret sorrows. Her skill at plot and suspense so magnify each story that together they interlock and become a complex and satisfying novel. It's like watching a magician pull from a hat a giant, astonishing rabbit who fills the stage while discussing reality and beauty in rich, literary language. All the parts of these fictions are wonderful, but their sum is a spellbinding whole. This spring she was awarded the Robert Penn Warren Prize for the body of her work.

Wayne Curtis is a contributing editor at The Atlantic magazine, where he
writes a bi-monthly column about cocktail culture. He's also a contributing
editor at Preservation magazine (published by the National Trust for
Historic Preservation), and has written for the New York Times, Smithsonian,
American Scholar, Saveur, Men's Journal, Yankee, American Archeology, andThis American Life. He's the author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10 Cocktails. (Crown, 2006), excerpts of which ran in
American Scholar, The Atlantic, and American Heritage. A graduate of Vassar College, Curtis was the winner of the 2002 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year by the Society of American Travel Writers. His article "Air World" was listed as one of the hundred notable stories of the year in "Best American Travel Writing 2007." The article covered his tour of America without ever leaving the airport - six days,
five airports, 106 hours of layover- as-vacation. In 2006, he and his wife moved from Maine to New Orleans.

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.

Jim Davis is a native of Columbia, TN (with William Gay to the west in Hohenwald and Robert Hicks to the north in Leiper’s Fork), and was graduated from Middle Tennessee State

University with a Master’s in English and a thesis on Eudora Welty. He taught on the college level in Tennessee for a while, and eventually found New Orleans in 1977, where he has stayed put ever since except for a couple of times a year when he misses family and the hills. After eight years at Jefferson Parish Library in Metairie, serving as Adult Programs Manager there, he now commutes to the State Library of Louisiana in Baton Rouge where he serves as Director of the Louisiana Center for the Book and the Louisiana Book Festival. In his spare time, he collects Cracker Jack prizes and more books than he can ever read. Jim will represent the State Library of Louisiana on the 2009 Words & Music faculty.The State Library of Louisiana is a co-sponsor of The Maltese Falcon BIG READ project and its programming during
Words & Music.

Pamela Binnings Ewen practiced law for 25 years and is a retired partner in the international law firm of Baker Botts, L.L.P. She is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction book Faith On Trial endorsed by her law partner, former Secretary of State, James A. Baker III. She now lives just outside New Orleans in Mandeville, LA and writes full time. While practicing law in Houston, Ewen served on the Board of Directors of Inprint, Inc., a non-profit organization supporting the literary arts in Houston. She and her husband are now member patrons of The Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society in New Orleans. Ewen's first novel, Walk Back The Cat, is the tense story of an embittered and powerful clergyman who learns an ancient secret, confronting him with truth and a choice that may destroy him. Her new novel, The Moon in the Mango Tree, was favorably reviewed by Publishers Weekly. Faith On Trial was chosen as a text for a course on law and religion at Yale Law School. Continuing the apologetics begun in Faith On Trial, Ewen also appears with Gary Habermas, Josh McDowell, Darrell Bock, Lee Stroble, and others in the film Jesus: Fact or Fiction, a Campus Crusade for Christ production. Ewen is the latest writer to emerge from a Louisiana family recognized for its statistically improbable number of successful authors. A cousin, James Lee Burke, who won the Edgar Award, wrote about their common ancestral grandfathers in his Civil War novel White Dove At Morning. Other writers in the family are Andre Dubus (Best Picture Oscar nomination for The Bedroom); his son, Andre Dubus III, author of The House of Sand and Fog ( Best Picture Oscar nomination and an Oprah pick); Elizabeth Nell Dubus, The Cajun Trilogy; and Alafair Burke, just starting out with the well received Samantha Kincaid mystery series.

Tom Franklin (Thomas G. Franklin)—critically acclaimed author of Poachers, a collection of short fiction which won the Edgar Allen Poe Award, and two novels, Smonk and Hell at the Breech—was born in the small southern town of Dickinson, AL, and later moved with his family to nearby Mobile, and attended the University of South Alabama there, earning his BA in English. Franklin earned his MFA in fiction at the University of Arkansas in 1998 and then returned to the University of South Alabama to teach. Shortly after he was awarded the Phillip Roth Residency in Creative Writing at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. Subsequently he was writer in residence at Knox College and the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss, instructing both undergraduate and graduate students in fiction writing course. Tom and his wife, the widely acclaimed poet Beth Ann Fennelly live in Oxford, MS where she is a member of the English Department. Winner of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, Franklin taught at Sewannee during the academic year 2002-2003. His short stories and essays have been published in such magazines as The Chattahoochee Review, Brightleaf, The Nebraska Review, The Texas Review, Quarterly West, and Smoke Magazine. to name a few. His and are included in anthologies such as New Stories from the South; The Year's Best, 1999; Best American Mystery Stories, 1999 and 2000; and Best Mystery Stories of the Century.

Leopold (Lee) Froehlich has worked as an editor at Playboy Magazine since 1991. He has edited, among others, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin and Gore Vidal. He currently is executive editor at the magazine and heads Playboy's book operations. Froehlich recently completed editing the six-volume 3,600-page Hugh Hefner's Playboy for Taschen, to be published this fall. His most recent feature story is Venus on the Half Shell for the October issue of Playboy, on the inimitable Louisiana oyster.

Kathleen George, born in Johnstown, PA, has wanted to write since childhood. She wrote stories and plays in high school and in her undergraduate years as a creative writing major at the University of Pittsburgh. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Theatre at the University of Pittsburg. For eight years she taught theatre and directed many plays at Carlow College, then she accepted a teaching position at Pitt where she has continued to direct and teach dramatic literature and playwriting. She is a Professor in the Theatre Arts Department.
In the 1980s, she added fiction to her career mix. In 1988, she earned an MFA degree in Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburg. Book-length fiction publications are: The Man in the Buick , a collection of stories; and the novels Taken, Fallen, Afterimage, and her most recent, The Odds. Her new new novel, Hideout, will be released next year. Ms. George has been granted fellowships at artists' colonies, including the VCCA and MacDowell. Her short fiction has appeared in journals and magazines which include Mademoiselle, Cimarron Review, North American Review, New Letters, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and one story was listed among the Distinguished in Best American Short Stories. Her theatre publications are: Rhythm in Drama, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980, Playwriting: The First Workshop, Allworth Press, 2008 (first in print with Butterworth (Focal Press) 1994), and Winter's Tales: Reflections on the Novelistic Stage, University of Delaware, 2005.She has taught for Pitt in London and has served as faculty and as Academic Dean for Semester at Sea. She has directed for Pitt's Mainstage and for the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival Productions which include The Rehearsal, The Country Wife, She Stoops to Conquer, The Winter's Tale, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, A Flea in Her Ear, and Our Town. A number of these productions were listed among the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Ten Best of the Year. She has also produced and sometimes directed more than sixty original plays written by her students. She is married to writer Hilary Masters. They live in Pittsburg.

Benjamin Goldhirsh is the founder and chairman of GOOD, an editorially led, member-driven community of people, private institutions, and corporations committed to pushing our world forward. GOOD's mission is to provide content that coalesces this community, experiences that deepen the relationships within this community, and utilities that empower this community. Good is also the name of the community's journal, published by Godhirsh, which is among the dynamic new media engaged in green journalism. Active in both regional and international philanthropic endeavors, Goldhirsh is one of the directors of The Goldhirsh Foundation, which supports dynamic social programs, environmental initiatives, innovative medical research and leading cultural institutions. Goldhirsh serves on the Board of Millennium Promise, an organization guided by the UN's Millennium Development goals to end extreme global poverty by 2025, as well as the Los Angeles Board of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship and the board of City Year Los Angeles. A graduate of Brown University and Phillips Academy, Goldhirsh currently resides in Los Angeles.

Dr. Janet V. Haedicke is Professor of English at University of Louisiana at Monroe, where she served for four years as Director of the University Performing Arts Series and two years as

President of the Faculty Senate. Co-editor with Kenneth Holditch of the Tennessee Williams Literary Journal, she has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary American drama in critical anthologies, reference volumes, and major journals, including Modern Drama and American Drama, where her contributions were recognized as distinguished. Presenting regularly at national conferences, Dr. Haedicke has served on the Boards of Southern Repertory Theatre in New Orleans and the American Theatre and Drama Society, as President of the DavidMamet Society, and as Performance Review editor of the David Mamet Newsletter. She is currently on the Executive Board of the Pirates Alley Faulkner Society in New Orleans.

Claire Hoffman works as a contributor for Rolling Stone, where she has written about a range of infamous personalities, from Amy Winehouse to Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Jackson. Claire is also an Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Riverside. Before Rolling Stone, Claire worked for Condé Nast Portfolio and the Los Angeles Times, where she

covered everything, including Hollywood, polygamist Mormons, and the adult entertainment industry. While at the Times, she wrote Baby Give Me a Kiss, a profile of Girls Gone Wild mogul Joe Francis. That story, which began with Francis’ assault on Claire and ended with his alleged rape of an 18-year old girl on the back of a roving party bus in Chicago, broke records on the latimes.com website for the most page views. Claire has two masters degrees—one in religious studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School and another from the Columbia School of Journalism. Before moving to California, Claire worked as an intern and a freelance reporter for the New York Times.

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. In 1974, he created the Literary Tour of the French Quarter and later a Tennessee Williams Walk. He has lectured on Tennessee Williams and other Southern authors in the United States and Europe and has appeared on BBC radio, NPR radio, and other media. His play about the women in Tennessee Williams’s life and dramas was given a staged reading at Lincoln Center. Dr. Holditch has written numerous articles on Southern literature about such important authors as William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Walker Percy, and Anne Rice. He edited In Old New Orleans, and is co-author with Richard Freeman Leavitt of Tennessee Williams and the South, both University Press of Mississippi releases; he is
co-author with Marda Burton of Galatoire’s: Biography of a Bistro, Hill Street Press; and co-editor with Mel Gussow of the two Library of America volumes devoted to the works of Tennessee Williams. His honors and awards include: Southern Fellowship, 1958-1960; Louisiana Teacher of the Year, 1985; Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, Lifetime Achievement Award, 2001; and The Tennessee Williams Award, 2007

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. She co-authored the non-fiction book, Plot or Politics?centering on the investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by the late N

ew Orleans District Attorney, Jim Garrison. Plot or Politics? was published in 1968 and remains in print. 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. She was a political reporter for the New Orleans States-Item and WWL-TV and has been a frequent contributor to design magazines, such as Southern Accents 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 native of the Carolinas, Ms. James has lived and worked in New Orleans since 1964. With her husband, Joseph DeSalvo, Jr., and Kenneth Holditch, she is co-founder of the Faulkner Society and the creator of Words & Music.

Barb Johnson has been a carpenter in New Orleans for more than 20 years. In 2008 she received her MFA from the University of New Orleans. While there, she won a grant from the Astraea Foundation, Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers and Washington Square’s short story competition. In 2009, she became the fifth recipient of A Room of Her Own foundation’s $50,000 Gift of Freedom. Harper Collins has released her first book, a collection of short stories entitled More of This World or Maybe Another. She lives and writes in New Orleans. Ms. Johnson has been a long time member of the Faulkner Society, contributing her talents as a reader for The William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. This year she is the final round judge of the Short Story category and will present her winner, Julie Chagi of Scotts Valley, CA, at Faulkner for All! She also is a member of the 2009 faculty for Words & Music. For more on this extraordinary new talent, see the story on her by Book Editor Susan Larson, which appeared on October 21st in The Times-Picayune:
http://www.nola.com/books/t-p/index.ssf?/base/living-1/125613001114360.xml&coll=1

Rodger Kamenetz is the bestselling author of The Jew in the Lotus and Stalking Elija and his memoir Terra Firma, centers on his relationship with his mother after her death. His most recent book is The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul. A poet, essayist, and professor, Kamenetz teaches English and religious studies at Louisiana State University alongside his wife Moira Crone, also a writer, who teaches creative writing. Rodger recently was selected to appear with Oprah Winfrey to discuss The History of Last Night's Dream. He is a popular lecturer. The Kamenetz family has played an integral role in the history of Words & Music, serving as faculty members and judges of the Faulkner Society's literary competition. Their daughter Anya, author of Generation Debt, a highly praised non-fiction book issued last year, worked with the Society as an intern while she was a student at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Their daughter Kezia, who won the Society's prize for best short story by a High School Student, while she was at NOCCA, has been student editor of the Society's journal, The Double Dealer. She is a student at Yale University now. Rodger and Moira, although faculty members at LSU in Baton Rouge, live in New Orleans by choice, choosing to become a part of ensuring a bright future for New Orleans.

Richard Layman is a publisher and author specializing in American literature and social history. He attended Indiana University, the University of Louisville, and the University of South Carolina, where he received his Ph.D. in 1975. Among his books are six on Dashiell Hammett, including the definitive bibliography; Shadow Man, the first full-length biography; Dashiell Hammett: Selected Letters (with Julie Rivett as Associate Editor), and, most recently, Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade. Layman’s books have twice been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award. A trustee of the Literary Property Trust of Dashiell Hammett, he has also written or edited books on Ring Lardner and John Dos Passos, as well as general works on American literature. Layman is president of Bruccoli Clark Layman, producers of award-winning reference books since 1978, including the 375-volume (to date)  Dictionary of Literary Biography, called the most impressive literary reference series in publishing history by Library Journal, and the social histories American Decades (ten Volumes) and American Eras (8 volumes). He lives in Columbia, South Carolina with his wife Nancy.

Dennis Lehane was born and raised in Dorchester, MA. He has written eight novels,: A Drink Before the War, Darkness, Take My Hand, Sacred, Gone Baby Gone, Prayers for Rain, Mystic River, Shutter Island, and his latest, The Given Day, which has received rave reviews. Kirkus Reviews, for instance, had this to say:

An historical epic that is easily the most ambitious work of Dennis Lehane’s career…Lehane has made another leap. As big an advance beyond Mystic River as Mystic River was from hisearlier books, The Given Day aspires to be nothing less than the Great American Novel…Its focus is the Boston police strike of 1919 and the bloody riots that resulted, but it’s really about the American dream, the resistance to change, the subversion of a country’s brightest ideals through its darkest impulses…If Lehane was ever a singles hitter, now he’s swinging for the fences.

Mystic River was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award and won both the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel as well as the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction given by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River were made into award winning films. A third film, Until Gwen, was based upon a short story written by Dennis. Director Martin Scorcese's adaptation of Shutter Island will open in early 2010. Before becoming a full-time writer, Mr. Lehane worked as a counselor with mentally handicapped and abused children, waited tables, parked cars, drove limos, worked in bookstores, and loaded tractor-trailers. His one regret is that no one ever gave him a chance to tend bar for money. He lives in the Boston area and in St. Petersburg, FL. For more on this exciting author, visit www.dennislehanebooks.com.
Laurie Lindeen

Laurie Lindeen, former front woman of all women indie rock band Zuzu's Petals, is the author of the memoir Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story. (Atria, 2007, Washington Square Press paperback 2008). The Washington Post calls Petal Pusher "An unsparingly honest -- and wickedly funny -- recollection of a young artist in search of herself." Her work also appears in online daily themorningnews.org, The Broken Plate literary annual, and in Rolling Stone Press's Altorockorama. A 2009 finalist for the upper midwest's prestigious Bush Artistic Fellowship, Lindeen is working on a novel and two essay collections. A Words & Music alumna, Laurie met her agent Jeff Kleinman at Words & Music in 2004. She teaches creative writing in Minneapolis area schools through a non-profit arts organization and lives there with her husband and son.

Laura Lippman was a reporter for 20 years, including 12 years at The (Baltimore) Sun. She began writing novels while working fulltime and published seven books about “accidental PI” Tess Monaghan before leaving daily journalism in 2001. Her work has been awarded the Edgar Allen Poe prize, the Anthony, the Agatha, the Shamus, the Nero Wolfe, Gumshoe and Barry awards. She also has been nominated for other prizes in the crime fiction field, including the Hammett and the Macavity. She was the first-ever recipient of the Mayor’s Prize for Literary Excellence and the first genre writer recognized as Author of the Year by the Maryland Library Association. Ms. Lippman returned to Baltimore in 1989 and has lived there since. Her novels include Baltimore Blues (1997, nominated for the Shamus Award for best first PI novel.) Charm City (1997, winner of the Eddgar ® and Shamus awards for best paperback original, nominated for the Anthony Award.) Butchers Hill (1998, winner of the Agatha Award for best novel, winner of the Anthony Award for best paperback original, nominated for the Edgar ®, Shamus and Macavity awards.) In Big Trouble (1999, winner of the Anthony and Shamus awards, nominated for an Edgar ® and Agatha.) The Sugar House (2000, winner of the Nero Wolfe Award.) In a Strange City (2001, a New York Times Notable Book.) The Last Place (2002, nominated for the Shamus Award.) Every Secret Thing (2003, winner of the Anthony and Barry Awards, nominated for the Hammett.) By a Spider’s Thread (2004, nominated for the Edgar, Agatha and Anthony awards, winner of the Romantic Times Award for Best PI Novel.) To the Power of Three (2005.) (winner of the Gumshoe Award for Best Novel.) No Good Deeds (2006): Winner of the Anthony Award; What the Dead Know; Another Thing to Fall (2007): Winner of the Quill, Anthony, Barry and Macavity Awards, nominated for the Gold Dagger; Hardly Knew Her (2008): The title story won the Anthony Award and was nominated for the Edgar Award; the novella, Scratch a Woman, was nominated for the Edgar. and Life Sentences (2009).

Bill Loehfelm, a rising star on the mystery horizon, was born in Brooklyn and raised on Staten Island. He moved to New Orleans in 1997 where he has taught high school and college, managed an antique shop, and tended bar in the French Quarter and the Warehouse District. Winner of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, his work has also appeared in the Nolafugees Press anthologies Year Zero, Life in the Wake, and Soul Is Bulletproof. He lives with his wife, writer A.C. Lambeth, in the Garden District. His new novel, Bloodroot, was released by Putnam in September.

Michael Malone, noted for his sharp humor, is author of the southern classic novel Handling Sin and three well received literary mysteries - Uncivil Seasons, Time's Witness, and First Lady - as well as numerous other novels and short stories. His stories have appeared in such national magazines as The New York Times, Harper's, Playboy, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, Newsday, Psychology Today, Mademoiselle, and The Atlanta Constitution. He regular adapts novels for the screen and he is a long-running screenwriter and Emmy winner for daytime TV drama. He teaches screenwriting and fiction at Duke University. He owns an historic plantation in Hillsborough, NC, a small town that is the home of many famous southern authors. Michael has been on book tour (over 40 cities!) for his new book, Four Corners of the Sky.

Ken Mask, M.D. writes novels of detective fiction, which include Murder at the Butt: A New Orleans Mystery, Luke Jacobs, PI: Mardi Gras Madness, and City Park Murder: Flowers on the Tops of Trees. Ken’s latest Luke Jacobs novel, Shanghai Snag, is a semi-finalist for the 2009 William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Positive feedback and constant demand from fans during an extensive book touring schedule prompted the development of Murder at the Butt as a motion picture. (Butt is a reference to the Funcky Butt nightclub in New Orleans. In addition to his writing, Ken co-created The N Word, a 2004 Peabody award winning documentary and wrote and produced Progressions, which won the 1997 New Orleans Film Festival award for Best Short. He also served as a consultant for Wynton Marsalis’ Pulitzer Prize winning Blood on the Fields and Grammy nominated House of Tribes. In addition, Ken was a production coordinator for Virgile Bedock’s New Orleans Music Renaissance. Ken’s charitable work includes founding the New Orleans based Books To You organization (www.bookstoyou.org) which distributes books to needy areas. He.received his medical degree from Duke University School of Medicine and his undergraduate in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is a Diplomat of the American Board of Radiology, Fellow of the American College of Radiology and has lectured on topics of radiology and surgery. Additionall, he has been a guest on numerous medical talk shows as well as NPR.Ken has written extensively for medical journals including: The Annals of Thoracic Surgery; Surgical Rounds; Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery and The Australian Radiological Journal. Popular mainstream magazine writing has included The Source and Offline.

Hilary Masters was born and raised in Kansas City, MO. He is a Navy veteran of World War II, and graduated from Brown University. He worked in journalism and as a Broadway press agent and then founded a weekly newspaper in Hyde Park, New York. His first work to be published appeared in the Quarterly Review of Literature edited by Theodore Weiss and thereafter appeared in a wide range of literary journals including The Sewanee Review, New Letters, The Virginia Quarterly Review, the Ohio Review, West Branch, and others. His short fiction and personal essays have been cited and included in numerous anthologies. They have been given the Balch Prize for fiction and the Monroe Spears award for the essay. Of his memoir Last Stands: Notes from Memory, Philip Lopate has said, “I doubt there has been a better-written memoir, page for page, in the last 20 years.” In 2003, the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave Masters’s work its Award for Literature. His third collection of essays was released in September by University of Nebraska Press in September, 2009, and his third collection of short fiction will appear from Southern Methodist University Press also in 2009. His tenth novel, Post, a Fable, will be published in 2010. He is married to the writer Kathleen George, and they live in Pittsburgh, Pa.

Robert McGarvey has written more than 1,500 articles for many of the nation's leading publications—from Reader's Digest to Playboy and from the NY Times to Harvard Business Review. He now writes frequently for Continental, Vital Care (a publication of the American Academy of Emergency Physicians), CIOUpdate,com, American Express' Executive Travel, Fortune Magazine, and the New York Times. He is authoring the chapter on offices in the Whole Green Catalog (Rodale, 2009). What he writes about evolves with his interests. Currently he writes a lot about business health, technology, energy, and being green. He has also written several books, including How To Dotcom (Entrepreneur Press, 2001) and The Complete Spy (Perigee, 1983). He is the co-author of Start Your Own E-Business (Entrepreneur Press, 2005) and he authored a chapter ("A Windy Tale on Cape Clear") in Travelers Tales Ireland (2003).

Burke McFerrin is Youth Services Coordinator for the Jefferson Parish Library. She is

responsible for managing youth collection development and youth services in Jefferson Parish's 13 libraries. Grants, Summer Reading, and promotional outreach are also duties of the Youth Services Coordinator. McFerrin is originally from Greenville, AL. She attended the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science, a public boarding school focused on math and science, and was graduated from Hamilton College, where she received a BA in English and Creative Writing. She then pursued an MLIS at the University of Alabama. Upon attaining her degree, she moved to New York where she worked as a research librarian for a pharmaceutical advertising firm. McFerrin moved to New Orleans in 2001 to take a position as the Children's Librarian at the West Bank Regional Library in Jefferson Parish. She subsequently worked as the Reference Department Head at the West Bank Regional Library and then as Rosedale Branch Manager before being promoted to her current position. In 2005 Miss McFerrin was named library employee of the year, parish employee of the year, and was selected by Gambit Weekly as one of the 40 under 40 to watch in the New Orleans area.

Eugene Mirman is a comedian, writer, and filmmaker based in New York City (where, according to commercials, salsa is terrible). As a child, he emigrated from Russia and experienced a John Cusack ‘80s high school movie life. Eugene attended Hampshire College in Western Massachusetts, where he designed his own Comedy major. Eugene has appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Comedy Central's Premium Blend and Jump Cuts, VH1, Third Watch, Cartoon Network's Home Movies and more. He also played a spokes-potato on Food Network and other oddities on various programs. In 2004, Eugene released The Absurd Nightclub Comedy of Eugene Mirman, a CD + DVD on Suicide Squeeze Records. The album was voted one of the Best Albums of 2004 by both The Onion and Time Out New York. Eugene has appeared at the HBO US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival, Bumbershoot, South by Southwest, and the Edinburgh Comedy Festival (at which he performed in a venue called the Smirnoff Underbelly…). His weekly standup-variety show "Invite Them Up," which he co-produces with Bobby Tisdale and Holly Schlesinger, recently won a Nightlife Award. No one knows exactly who they are, but Tony Danza was there and so was one of the Golden Girls. Comedy Central Records recently released a 3-CD + DVD Invite Them Up set. Eugene is also a frequent guest at Tinkle, a show hosted by Todd Barry, David Cross, and Jon Benjamin. Often touring the country, Eugene occasionally opens for the comedy troupe Stella (former members of The State), various bands and others. Eugene has opened for The Shins and toured with Modest Mouse, Yo La Tengo and as part of the 2006 Unlimited Sunshine Tour. Recorded live at Piano’s in New York City, En Garde, Society! is Eugene’s second full-length comedy album with DVD supplement, and his first for Sub Pop Records. On the new album, Eugene blends things he notices in the world with talking about them in a funny way.

Rick Moody is the author of four novels, including The Ice Storm, Purple America and The Diviners, three collections of stories, including Demonology, and a memoir, The Black Veil. His short work has appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Times, and The Guardian. He writes on music for The Rumpus, at www.therumpus.net. With his band, The Wingdale Community Singers, he has recorded two albums, the most recent of which is Spirit Duplicater, recently released on Scarlet Shame. He also sings with Wesley Stace in the prog/folk band Authros. His new novel, The Four Fingers of Death, is expected in spring 2010. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Otto Penzler (born July 8, 1942) is a well-known editor and publisher of mystery fiction in the United States, and proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, where he lives. Three mystery anthologies edited by Penzler were

released this fall. They are: The Vampire Archives, Vintage, The Best American Mystery Stories, 2009, Houghton Mifflin, and The Lineup, Little, Brown. Located in Tribeca, The Mysterious Bookshop is one of the oldest and largest mystery specialist bookstores in America. Penzler wrote 101 Greatest Movies of Mystery and Suspense (2000). For the New York Sun, he wrote The Crime Scene, a popular weekly mystery fiction column that ran for several years. He has worked with several outstanding authors including Elmore Leonard, Nelson DeMille, Joyce Carol Oates, Sue Grafton, Mary Higgins Clark, Robert Crais, Michael Connelly, James Lee Burke and Thomas H. Cook.

Tom Piazza is the author of nine books, including the novel City Of Refuge, which won the 2008 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, and the post-Katrina classic Why New Orleans Matters. His other books include the Faulkner Society Award-winning novel My Cold War, and the short-story collection Blues and Trouble, which won the James Michener Award for Fiction. No less a literary critic than Bob Dylan has said, "Tom Piazza's writing pulsates with nervous electrical tension – reveals the emotions that we can't define." A well known writer on American music as well, Tom won a 2004 Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey and is a three-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Bookforum, The Oxford American, Columbia Journalism Review, and other periodicals. He is currently a writer for the upcoming HBO series Treme, set in post-Katrina New Orleans, and is at work on a new novel. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he lives in New Orleans.

Dave Pirner, rock recording star and co-creator of Soul Asylum, a band which has enjoyed numerous hits for singles and albums. Pirner is best known for his vast body of work as the lead singer and songwriter for Soul Asylum and for his Grammy for the runaway hit song Runaway Train. In the 1990s, Pirner performed for President and First Lady Hillary Clinton at the White House, and was in the media spotlight continuously. One of his songs is in the 1994 film Reality Bites. Pirner was a part of the all-star band assembled for the soundtrack of the 1994 film Backbeat and also contributed to the soundtrack of Kevin Smith's 1997 film Chasing Amy. His song Can't Even Tell is featured in Clerks, and Smith used the song Misery in the sequel, Clerks II. He also contributed guest vocals on the song Chillout Tent in the Hold Steady 2006 release, Boys and Girls in America. Today, he prefers to be known as “a New Orleans musician.” He moved to the Crescent City a decade ago and quickly decided it is the only place in the world that could give him “the musical kick in the ass” that he was looking for and you can hear it on Faces & Names, his 2002 debut solo album, from the laid-back feeling of the songs to the bevy of New Orleans guest musicians who pepper the work. Although he skips town to play Soul Asylum gigs and work on new music with members of the band, his home remains New Orleans, where he lives with his wife and son in Bywater, an historic district downriver from the French Quarter, and where he has a recording studio with a collective of musicians. He and the band are prepping a new album for a 2010 release. The latest release by Soul Asylum is The Silver Lining. Go to Soul Asylum.com to hear the sound. Hit songs of the group in addition to Runaway Train, have included Black Gold, Misery, and Just Like Anyone.

Julia Reed is a contributing editor for Newsweek. She started there in 1978 as an intern at the magazine's Washington bureau while attending Georgetown University. She worked for the Orlando Sentinel as a business reporter and got her start covering campaigns in 1988, when she worked at U.S. News & World Report. For the past 20 years she has been a writer at Vogue, in charge of the magazine's political coverage. She has written profiles of Al Gore, George W. Bush and, most recently, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Elizabeth Edwards. She also writes for the New York Times and London's "The Spectator" and appears regularly on MSNBC and CNN. Since 2005 Reed has lived in New Orleans full-time and contributed to coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with first-person accounts of the devastation of the city. A collection of her essays about the South, Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena was published by Random House in 2004. Her new memoir, The House on First Street, was published by Harper Collins/Ecco. She is married to New Orleans attorney John Pearce. They live in the house on First Street.

Mona Lisa Saloy, Author and Folklorist, is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Dillard University. Mona Lisa’s first collection of verse, Red Beans and Ricely Yours: Poems, won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Prize in 2006, the T. S. Eliot Prize in poetry for 2005, and was published by Truman State University Press. This collection also was finalist for the Morgan Prize from StoryLine Press. In 2006, The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia commissioned Mona Lisa Saloy to compose and perform a poem entitled We, celebrating 2006 Liberty Medal Recipients: President William J. Clinton and President

George H.W. Bush. Most recently, Dr. Saloy’s work has appeared in Dear Success Seeker: Wisdom from Outstanding Women, Michelle R. Wright, editor, from Simon & Shuster, 2009. Her essay, Natural & Unnatural Disasters, will appear in the book Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Camille Dungy, editor. University of Georgia Press, December 2009. In 2007, Dr. Saloy’s chapter, The World Loves New Orleans, but America has not Come to its Rescue, was published in the collection of essays edited by David Starkey entitled Living Blue in the Red Statesfrom University of Nebraska Press. Dr. Saloy, who is listed in the Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers, has a Ph.D. in English from Louisiana State University, where she also received an MFA in Creative Writing. She also has an MA from San Francisco State University, and a BA from the University of Washington. Some of Saloy’s articles are available on the Louisiana Division of the Arts Folklife web site. Saloy won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the United Negro College Fund/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue her research on Black Beat poet Bob Kaufman. Her article Black Beats and Black Issues, appears in Beat Culture and the New America 1950-1965 published byWhitney Museum of American Art. Keynote Speaker at the Re-Building New Orleans Conference at Tulane University, she has been a Writer in Residence at the Arna Bontemps Museum in Alexandria, LA; guest writer at University of Missouri; and featured writer at the Zora Neale Hurston Festival at Santa Barbara Community College, and DeBose Festival featured writer. Saloy lectures monthly on Muses of various cultures at Ashe Cultural Center. She has been a member of the Advisory Council of the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society.

Julie Smith is the author of 20 novels, most of them set in New Orleans and starring one or the other of her detective heroes, an ex-debutante turned cop named Skip Langdon, and a private investigator named Talba Wallis, who is also a performance poet whose stage name is the Baroness Pontalba. Both of these female sleuths are tough and wily and totally engaging. A

Savannah native, Ms. Smith is a long-time New Orleans resident, who also lived and worked as a reporter in San Francisco before moving to New Orleans. She's the editor of the recent acclaimed anthology, New Orleans Noir , and she's also written numerous short stories and essays. Her novel, New Orleans Mourning, won the Edgar Allan Poe award for best novel.

Erica Spindler has enjoyed extraordinary success as an author of suspense fiction. Her 30 novels and consistent New York Times Bestseller status make her one of the leading mystery writers in America. Her current release is Breakneck, another NewYork Times bestselling title

. While investigating the murders of several innocent, clean-cut victims, two female detectives struggle to balance their dual roles. They must learn to trust each other and to walk the fine line between upholding the law and taking it into their own hands as they race to find a murderer on the verge of striking again. Erica's next thriller, Blood Vines, is due out March 2010. Set in the wine country of California, the heroine is a woman who discovers the past she has "known" is a lie; the hero is a Sonoma County Sheriff's detective with secrets of his own and the plot revolves around the
heroine's hunt for the truth, terrible though it may be, and the desperate acts of those who would keep the past buried. Ms. Spindler lives and
works in Covington, LA.

Wesley Stace, AKA John Wesley Harding, is a gifted fiction writer and songwriter who finds satisfaction juggling his careers as fiction writer and and musical performance artist and composer. Born in England as Wesley Stace, the name he uses as a writer, got great reviews for his second novel, By George, which was selected as a 2007 New York Public Library Book To Remember. His debut novel, Misfortune, an international bestseller. He is the convivial ringleader of the Cabinet of Wonders, a performance group now touring the country. The group will do a special edition performance at Faulkner for All during Words & Music, 2009. He conceived of the Cabinet as a means of bringing his writing and musician friends together. All performers who join him in performances are both accomplished writers and musical or comedy performing artists and the shows are a mix of literature on the light side and music. His regular sidekick and “co-wonder” is comedian Eugene. He will be joined in New Orleans by Mirman and by novelist Rick Moody, also a bandleader; mystery writer and musician Laura Lippman; non fiction author and musician Laurie Lindeen, a winner several years ago in the Faulkner Society’s national essay competition.. He is possessed with an “unfailing love of early musicals and vaudeville” and Wes and Eugene's Cabinet of Wonders is based on the Victorian tradition in well-heeled homes of curiosity cabinets displaying exotica. A folk-rock artist, his stage name is John Wesley Harding. As Harding, he has had a successful career on stage and as a recording artist. His newest disk is Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. The Wall Street Journal had this to say: "Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead deserves attention… The 43-year-old Mr. Harding writes lyrics that dazzle without condescending; a clever turn of phrase always seems within his reach, and his narrators aren't afraid to stake out an unpopular point of view. His songs are delivered with an appealing lilt, and several melodies on the new disc are instantly memorable." For more on this exciting artist, visit his web sites: WesleyStace.com and JohnWesleyHarding.com

José Torres Tama is a multidisciplinary artist working in poetry/fiction, visual and performance art. His most recent work is an art book, New Orleans Free People of Color of New Orleans and Their Legacy: The Artwork of José Torres Tama, which documents his exhibition of pastel portraits on paper of 19th century Creoles of Color. Published by the Ogden Museum of Southern Arts, the book was made possible through an award from Joan Mitchell Foundation in New York. He is the recipient of a 2009/10 Creation Fund Award by the National Performance Network in New Orleans for the commissioning of a new solo work called Aliens, Immigrants & Other Evildoers, which chronicles the current rise in hate crimes against Latino immigrants in the United States. A Louisiana Theater Fellow and NEA award recipient, a 2008/09 Louisiana Division of the Arts grant was used to perform his post-Katrina solo The Cone of Uncertainty in London, Liverpool, and Aberystwyth, Wales, as part of his 2009 international tour profiled in American Theatre’s March ’09 issue. Among other awards, he received a 2005/06 Fund for the Arts Fellowship from the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture through a Ford Foundation initiative to develop his performance book manuscript called The Dream Knows More than You: Performance Chronicles of a Latino Immigrant. Much of his work explores the mythology of the immigrant experience. An NEA award recipient for his performance work, he received a 2005-06 Fellowship from the National Association of Latino Arts Culture through a Ford Foundation initiative to develop a book manuscript anthology of his performance texts as literature. His post-Katrina commentaries have aired on NPR's Latino USA, and he is working on a collection of essays called Hard Living in the Big Easy: Exiled in New Orleans after Katrina. His critically acclaimed solo, The Cone of Uncertainty, chronicles his dramatic escape from the flooded city three days after the levees breached, and has been presented by institutions such as Vanderbilt University, LSU, Ohio State, and the University of Maryland. In April of 2009, The Cone made its European debut at Roehampton University in London. www.torrestama.com

Gordon Walmsley, a New Orleans native, was graduated from Princeton University (German Literature) and has lived for the last 25 years in Copenhagen, with his Danish wife. He is editor and founder of The Copenhagen Review, an online magazine that takes place in five languages. He returns regularly to New Orleans. He has given workshops in England, Denmark, Switzerland, and the United States. Author of five books of poems, his work also has appeared in various international journals, most recently The Cork LIterary Review, Ireland. His work is due to appear shortly in al-Adaab, one of the most prestigious journals of the Arab world, published in Beirut. His fifth collection of poems, entitled Touchstones, a Journey Through Poems in Xenophobic Times, was published recently by the distinguished Irish publisher of poetry Salmon Publishing. In addition to writing poetry, Walmsley has edited and translated (from Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) Fire and Ice, an Anthology of Nine Poets from Scandinavia and the North. He is a member of the board of Poesiens Hus, Denmark's new Poetry House, and a member of Danish Writers of Poetry and Fiction.

Ken Wells has a new book out about Katrina survivors and heroes, The Good Pirates of Drowned Bayous. A career journalist and novelist, grew up in a beer-drinking family on the banks of Bayou Black deep in Louisiana's Cajun Delta. Recently, he made a career change to become an editor with the new business journal, Portfolio, but he began his writing career as a 19-year-old college dropout covering car wrecks and gator sightings for the Houma Courier in his home town. He left the bayous in 1975 for the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where he earned a master's degree and went on to a feature-writing job at the Miami Herald. In 1982, his final year at the Herald, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a series on how a vast flood-control system built for powerful agribusiness interests was helping to decimate the Florida Everglades. Wells joined the Wall Street Journal that year and served stints in the San Francisco and London bureaus before moving to New York in 1993 as a features editor for Page One. He's covered stories as disparate as polygamy in Utah, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, South Africa's transition to a multi-racial democracy, and the first Persian Gulf War. More recently, as a Page One editor, he supervised a small team of reporters who wrote exclusively for the front page on issues such as race, immigration and the environment. Two of his reporters won Pulitzer Prizes, including the 1999 prize for feature writing. In his spare time, Wells drinks beer, fishes when he can, dabbles in songwriting and writes fiction. He is the author of three well-received novels of the Cajun bayous, Meely LaBauve, Junior's Leg and Logan's Storm. His latest book in the series is Crawfish Mountain. He is also the editor of two anthologies from Wall Street Journal Books, Floating Off the Page: the B est Stories from the Wall Street Journal's ÔMiddle Column and Herd on the Street: Animal Stories from the Wall Street Journal. A recent book, Travels with Barley, put Wells on the road to find out about American beer drinking tastes. He works in Manhattan and lives with his family under some very large oak trees on the far outskirts of town.

Andy Young is the co-editor of Meena and an instructor in the Creative Writing Department at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, Riverfront. An interview she conducted was recently featured in McSweeney's Voices of the Storm and her poems, essays and translations have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Third Coast, Electronic Lebanon, Callaloo, Margie, Southern Quarterly, Mexico's Forum, Lebanon's Nawafez, Dublin's The Stinging Fly, the anthology We Begin Here (Interlink Books), and the Norton anthology Contemporary Voices of the Eastern World and on buses in Santa Fe, NM. Her chapbook All Fires the Fire was published in 2003 in a limited, hand-made edition by Faulkner House Books. She was a 2000 Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellow, a 2005 Surdna Artist-Teacher Fellow, a recent writer-in-residence at the Santa Fe Arts Institute and the Vermont Studio Center and an invited guest to the 2007 Nicaragua International Poetry Festival. She was recently named a finalist in Margie's Strong Medicine Award.

Excellent Editors

Adrienne Brodeur did not set out to work in publishing. She took her BA in Urban Studies (Columbia) and her Masters in Government Administration (U. Penn) to pursue a career in public policy. But life had other plans. Adrienne is now both a writer and editor. She founded the fiction magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with filmmaker Francis Coppola and was its editor in chief for seven years during which time it won the National Magazine Award for Best Fiction. She has been a fiction judge for the National Book Award, the New York Public Library, Poets & Writers, the Morning News, and other contests, and she’s taught classes in writing and publishing at various conferences and schools, including directing Zoetrope’s annual writers’ workshop at Coppola’s resort in Belize. In 2005, her first novel, MAN CAMP, was published by Random House. Currently, she is a contributing editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, where she acquires mostly fiction and some memoir.

Carole DeSanti is Vice President, Editor at Large at the Penguin Group USA, acquiring for Viking Penguin. A graduate of Smith College and the Radcliffe Publishing Course, she began her editorial career 20 years ago.DeSanti’s list includes Dorothy Allison, National Book Award Finalist for Bastard Out Of Carolina; Melissa Bank, bestselling author of The Girl’s Guide To Hunting And Fishing; Ruth Ozeki, award-winning author of My Year of Meats; Booker-Prize winner Penelope Lively; Costco-shopper favorite Elizabeth Brundage; African-American powerhouse Terry McMillan and Marisha Pessl’s bestselling debut novel, Special Topics In Calamity Physics. She has published pieces in The Women’s Review of Books and the anthology Don’t Tell Mama, edited by Regina Barreca.

Ryan Doherty joined Random House in 2006 after working at HarperCollins, following jobs and internships at Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and MTV. He edits an eclectic list of books, including memoirs, narrative non-fiction (with a special interest in pop culture, music, and military), blog and trend titles, humor and the occasional novel. His recent projects range from the serious: Shadow of the Sword, chronicling Jeremiah Workman's valor in Iraq and subsequent battle with PTSD, and a literary Vietnam War memoir Loon by Jack McLean, to the fun: the vampire humor parody The New Vampire's Handbook, the blog-to-book success F My Life, The Second City Unscripted, an oral history of the famed Second City comedy club in Chicago, and Robert Conroy, whose most recent alternate history novel is 1942.

Will Murphy is an Executive Editor at Random House, where he has worked for six years. Previously, he was a senior editor at the University of Minnesota Press, and the literary editor at the University of California Press in Berkeley. Will was recently was named one of "50 Under 40," who matter in publishing by Publishers Weekly. Murphy has become known for editing books that matter, such as the powerful Finn by Jon Clinch and the beautiful new work by Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence; as well as The Second World: Enemies and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna. And on his not-yet-scheduled list are How Success Happens by David Brooks and The Battle of the Crater by Richard Slotkin. Other authors include include Jeff Shaara, David Brooks, Bernard-Henri Levy, Philip Zimbardo, and Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, which was on the New York Times Bestseller List for 16 weeks.

Richard Nash ran the renowned independent publisher Soft Skull Press from 2001 until March of this year. Richard was awarded the Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing .

Soft Skull has published many award winning works such as Lambda’s 2007 Book of the Year, Michael McColly's The After-Death Room, and 2004’s Best Book, Choir Boy by Charlie Anders. Other key authors include Mark Ames, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, Paul Berman, Lisa Crystal Carver, Dennis Cooper, Brian Gage, Douglas A. Martin, William Upski Wimsatt, James Hatfield, Maggie Estep, Amanda Stern, Michael Muhammad Knight. Nick Mamatas, Lydia Millet, Daniel Nester, Wanda Phipps, Genesis P-Orridge, Nate Powell, Robert Rosen, Jack Sargeant, K. Thor Jensen, Lynne Tillman, Ken Dolan-Del Vecchio and Tim Wise. Richard spoke on the Buzz Panel at last year's Book Expo, and more recently The LA Times flew him out April 09 to speak on "The Future of Publishing". His current project is a start-up called Round Table, a collection of social publishing communities including one with his own editorial proclivities, Red Lemonade.

Sampsell, founded Future Tense Press, which has published small books by many writers including Mike Topp, Eric Spitznagel, Chelsea Martin, Gary Lutz, and Claudia Smith. In 2001, he published Please Don’t Kill the Freshman by teen phenomenon Zoe Trope, which was picked up by HarperCollins. Shortly after, another book published by Future Tense, Grosse Pointe Girl, by Sarah Grace McCandless, was bought by Simon & Schuster. In 2005, Kevin teamed up with legendary publisher Manic D Press to edit a new series of paperback books. As a writer, Kevin’s fiction has been published widely in literary journals (Quick Fiction, LIT, Hobart, Opium) and on websites (like McSweeney's, Nerve, Failbetter, Pindeldyboz, and Night Train). His books include the story collections, Beautiful Blemish and Creamy Bullets. He also edited the anthologies, The Insomniac Reader (2005) and Portland Noir (2009, part of the award-winning series from Akashic Books). His new memoir, A Common Pornography, will be released by Harper Collins early next year

Michael Signorelli has been at HarperCollins Publishers since 2005. His list ranges widely from poetry and stories to novels and memoirs to graphic novels and design. He edits New York Times bestselling author Kenneth C. Davis, internationally acclaimed novelists Dennis Cooper, Richard Milward, John Niven, and Tony O’Neill, memoirists Dan White and Kevin Sampsell, and AROHO’s Gift of Freedom recipient (and New Orleans local) Barb Johnson, among others. His recent acquisitions include work by American authors Justin Taylor, Charlie Smith, and Hannah Nordhaus. He created and wrote HarperCollins’s poetry blog www.cruelestmonth.com and helps manage Harper Perennial’s blog www.olivereader.com. Michael’s keen for fearless yet disciplined debut fiction and for culturally significant non-fiction by experts in their field. He graduated with a degree in English from Hamilton College and lives in New York City.

Pat Walsh is the Editor-in-Chief of MacAdam/Cage, a publisher of fiction and narrative non-

fiction. As editor-in-chief, Pat oversees the acquisitions, editing, and promotion of a list of more than 50 books a year. Pat is also is the author of 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why it Just Might (Penguin), a book outlining the challenges that face writers and authors today. MacAdam/Cage is known industry-wide for its ability to find and debut new voices to great acclaim. Among its titles are Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, Awesome by Jack Pendarvis and The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

Awesome Agents

Brandi Bowles has been an agent with Howard Morhaim Literary Agency in Brooklyn, NY, since 2007. She was previously an editor at Three Rivers Press. As an agent she represents a wide range of authors, from burlesque performers to archeologists, illustrators, professors, CEOs, chefs, rappers, folk musicians, and fitness gurus. Said Brandi in one interview, "I really love big idea books, and books about broad sociological phenomena, but will only consider them if they are written by experts in their fields. I love books that shed new light on something in pop culture, media culture, and everyday life. In terms of fiction, I like Southern fiction, experimental fiction, and cross-cultural novels. Quirky, funny, edgy, or naughty book ideas are always welcome in my inbox, and bonus points go to any authors that can make me laugh."

Paul Bresnick established his literary agency in 2004. His career began as fiction editor at Penthouse Magazine where he published, among others, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, John Hawkes, James Purdy, T.C. Boyle, and Don DeLillo. Thereafter, Paul had a long & distinguished career as an editor at Simon & Schuster, Henry Holt, Doubleday, & William Morrow. His books included the signature best sellers The Cinderella Complex by Colette Dowling, The Second Stage by Betty Friedan, Bill Cosby’s 3 million copy best selling Fatherhood, and Separated at Birth by the editors of Spy magazine; On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates, Black Profiles in Courage by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hell's Angel by Sonny Barger, Poachers by Tom Franklin, and Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund. As an agent, he represents a wide range of authors, including John Leland, RJ Smith, Ellis Weiner, Terry McDermott, Jack Pendarvis, Charles Rappleye, Steven Kotler, and others.

Molly Friedrich graduated from Barnard College in l974 with a B.A. in Art History . After working in editorial and publicity positions at Doubleday, she became an agent with The Aaron Priest Literary Agency. Two years ago, and 30 years later (!), Molly opened her own agency, The Friedrich Agency. Molly represents a small number of talented, intelligent writers, among them novelists Sue Grafton, Elizabeth Strout, Cathleen Schine, Jane Smiley, Terry McMillan, Esmeralda Santiago, Melissa Bank, Ruth Ozeki, Lisa Scottoline and Valerie Martin. Her non-fiction authors include her late father, Otto Friedrich and memoirists Frank McCourt, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith and Susanna Sonnenberg, among others. She also represents the biographers, Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens whose first book, DeKooning, won five literary awards.

Deborah Grosvenor has worked in book publishing for more than 20 years as an editor and literary agent. During her career, Grosvenor has edited or represented several hundred fiction and nonfiction books in the areas of history, biography, politics, current affairs, memoir, the environment, the military, the South, and science, among others. Her best-known acquisition as an editor was a first novel, The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy. Deborah also signed up bestselling author Homer Hickham's first work, Torpedo Junction, and helped launch bestselling author's Stephen Coonts's first novel, Flight of the Intruder. After running her own agency, the Grosvenor Literary Agency, for ten years, Deborah merged her company last October with the Kneerim and Williams Agency.. She and her colleagues represent a range of authors, from New York Times best-sellers to Pulitzer prize winners, among them Brad Meltzer, James Fenton, Stephen Greenblatt, Joseph Ellis, Christopher Hitchens, Caroline Elkins, Juan Cole, Dr. Susan Love, E.O. Wilson, Robert Pinsky, Howard Gardner, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Edward M. Hallowell, Graham Allison, Elizabeth Pryor, Henry Allen, Tom Oliphant, Eleanor Clift, Curtis Wilkie, Aaron Miller, and Mort Kondracke.

Michael Murphy has been in book publishing 28 years. His first 13 years were with Random House, where he was a Vice President. Later, he ran William Morrow as their Publisher. In September, 2007, he formed his own agency, Max & Co. A Literary Agency & Social Club. One of his authors, who attended Words & Music, 2008 is New York Times best selling Tony O'Neill, who has been tabbed by Esquire magazine as the IT writer of the current decade, joining their other choices, Jack Kerouac (1960s), Hunter S Thompson (1970s), Bret Easton Ellis (1980s), and Irvine Welsh (1990s). His forthcoming novel, Sick City, branches into the Noir category and has been described as "Unmistakably Tony O'Neill, but as though he's been snorting high grade Jim Thompson & mainlining Elmore Leonard." Two of his authors attending this year are New Orleans residents, Andrea Young and Barb Johnson. Barb was Glimmer Train's Best New Voice 2007, and won the Washington Square competition the same year. She was recipient of A Room of Her Own grant for 2009. Her first book, More of This World or Maybe Another was just published by HarperCollins. Andy Young is an accomplished poet who is now writing both fiction and non-fiction prose.

Ann Rittenberg is president of her own literary agency in New York. In addition to Dennis Lehane (author of Mystic River, Shutter Island, and The Given Day), the agency’s authors include C.J. Box, author of Blue Heaven, winner of the 2009 Edgar Award for Best Novel, and

the Wyoming mystery series featuring game warden Joe Pickett; Adam Fawer (Improbable); Laura Whitcomb (A Certain Slant of Light); Loren Pope (Colleges That Change Lives), Paul Doiron, editor of Down East: The Magazine of Maine, whose first novel, The Poacher’s Son, will come out in June; and Debra Austin, author of Daughter of Kura, a novel set in Africa 500,000 years ago recently published by Simon & Schuster. She lives in Brooklyn with the world’s best husband, Paul Rittenberg, and three teenage daughters whose combined brilliance sometimes forces her to retreat to her iPod for private sessions with Missy Elliott and Gwen Stefani, music they are far too sophisticated to tolerate. Her dog, an extremely literate papillon called Ben Ben, has never peed on a manuscript.

Howard Yoon is the Vice President and Editorial Director of the Gail Ross Literary Agency. Howard began his publishing career 15 years ago as Gail’s literary assistant. He has served as an agent, writer, and editor on numerous fiction and non-fiction book projects. In 2000, he was the founder and president of an online venture, Authors Online, and in 2003 he co-authored a business book, Begging for Change (HarperCollins) with Robert Egger, which won the McAdams Award for Best Book on the Nonprofit Sector. As a literary agent, he is interested in nonfiction topics ranging from current events and politics to culture to religion and history, to smart business. He is also looking for commercial fiction by published authors. An avid foodie, he is a featured columnist for NPR.org’s Kitchen Window series. He is also currently teaching a narrative nonfiction writing class in the Masters of Journalism Program at Georgetown University.

The American Dream: To Become A Great...and Published...Writer
Every writer's ultimate impossible dream is publication of that manuscript embodying the writer's heart and soul and countless lonely hours of grappling with words, seeking the right word pictures to make a character, a plot line come alive...

Words & Music 2009: Fabulous Faculty!

Amazing Authors

Excellent Editors

Awesome Agents