Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society: Words & Music Faculty

Howard Bahr, author of three critically acclaimed novels about the American Civil War, was born in Meridien,MS. Bahr, who served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam
War and then worked for several years on the railroads, enrolled at the University of Mississippi in the early 1970s when he was in his late 20s. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Ole Miss and served as the curator of the William Faulkner house, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, MS for nearly 20 years. He also taught American literature during much of this time at the University of Mississippi. In 1993, he became an instructor of English at Motlow State College, where he worked until 2006. His novels centering on the American Civil War are Black Flower, A Novel of the Civil War, The Year of Jubilo, and The Judas Field. He currently resides in Jackson, Mississippi, and teaches courses in creative writing at Belhaven College. For more on Howard, Click Here.

John Biguenet, 2009 winner of the Faulkner Society's Alihot (A Legend in His Own Time ) Award, is a fiction writer, poet, translator, playwright, and Distringuished Unitversity Professor at Loyola University of the South in New Orleans. He is 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. For more on John and his work,Click Here!.

Elise Blackwell, originally from South Louisiana, is the author of three previous novels:Hunger, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, and Grub. Her newest novel is An Unfinished Score, a work of literary art, which revolves around classical music and performing arttists. Her books have been selected for numerous "best of the year" lists, including The Los Angeles Times, Sydney Morning Herald, and Kirkus. Her short stories and criticism have appeared in Witness, Topic, Seed, Global City Review, and Quick Fiction. An Associate Professorof English at the University of South Carolina, she recently has been named Director of the MFA program at USC. For more about Elise and her new novel, Click Here!

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of 22 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, Alphabet Juice (Farrar, Straus), is now out in paperback also available as an audiobook. The next most recent, 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." Coming up next are Hail, Hail, Euphoria! -- The Marx Brothers in Duck Soup. (October, 2010, HarperStudio) and Alphabetter Juice, in progress. 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 October he received the Thomas Wolfe Award from the University of North Carolina. For more on Roy and his impressive body of work, Click Here!

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.

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans. In 2010, she will publish two books of poetry, Breach, to be published by LSU Press in April 2010, which focuses on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, and Milk Dress, co-winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award, to appear with Alice James Books in November. She has published two other books of poems and a novel. She has been awarded the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a "Discovery"/Nation Award, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. She directs the new MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College-City University of New York. For more on Nicole Cooley and her work, Click Here.

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.

Heidi W. Durrow is a graduate of Stanford, Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, and Yale Law School. She is the recipient of a Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Writers, and a Jentel Foundation Residency. She won top honors in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition and the Chapter One Fiction Contest. She has received grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the American Scandinavian Foundation, the Roth Endowment, and the American Antiquarian Society. Originally from Portland, OR, Heidi has worked as a corporate litigator at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and as a consultant to the National Football League and National Basketball Association. She is the co-host of the award-winning weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat; and the co-founder and co-producer of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, an annual public event, that celebrates stories of the mixed experience. Durrow's writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Callaloo, Poem/Memoir/Story, the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Essence magazine, and Newsday. She received writer Barbara Kingsolver's 2008 Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change for The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, her first novel. For more on Ms. Durrow and her book, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
For more on Bill and his new book, Click Here.

Stanley Lombardo, Professor of Classics at the University of Kansas, is a native of New Orleans. He has a B.A. from Loyola University in New Orleans, an M.A. from Tulane University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas (1976). In 1976 he joined the faculty at the University of Kansas, where he served as department chair for 15. years. He teaches Greek and Latin at all levels, as well as general courses on Greek literature and culture. He was awarded a Kemper Teaching Fellowship by the university and a Mortar Board Teaching Award. Since 2004 he has served as director of the University Honors Program. Professor Lombardo's publications are primarily literary translations of Greek and Latin poetry, including Homer's Iliad (Hackett, 1997; reviewed in the New York Times, 7/20/97; recipient of the Byron Caldwell Book Award; performed by Aquila Theatre Company at Lincoln Center, 1999); Homer’s Odyssey (Hackett, 2000; reviewed in the New York Times, 7/09/00, and a New York Times Book of the Year); and translations of Plato, Hesiod, Callimachus, Sappho, (a finalist for the 2003 Pen Literary Award for translation); Virgil's Aeneid (a finalist for the 2005 Pen Literary Award for translation); and most recently, Dante’s Inferno (Hackett, 2009). He maintains an interest in Asian philosophy and has co-authored a translation of Tao Te Ching and co-edited an anthology of Zen texts. He is currently working on a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Purgatorio. Dr. Lombardo has given lectures and dramatic readings of his translations on campuses throughout the country, as well as at such venues as the Smithsonian Institution, the Chicago Poetry Center and on C-SPAN and National Public Radio. His recordings of his translations of Homer are available as audio books (Parmenides Publishing).

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.

Tim O'Brien, National Book Award winner, is author of The Things They Carried, is an American fiction writer who concentrates primarily on stories of the Vietnam War and the impact the war had on the American soldiers who fought there. He regularly teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Minnesota West Technical College in Worthington, Minnesota and currently holds the Mitte Chair in Creative Writing at the MFA program of Texas State University-San Marcos. He was born in Austin, MN, a town of about 9,000 people (a setting which figures prominently in his novels). When O'Brien was ten, his family, including a younger sister and brother, moved to Worthington, Minnesota, a place that once billed itself as "the turkey capital of the world." Worthington had a large influence on O’Brien’s imagination and early development as an author. The town is located on Lake Okabena in the western portion of the state and serves as the setting for some of his stories, especially those in the collection titled "The Things They Carried". He earned his BA in Political Science from Macalester College in 1968. That same year he was drafted into the infantry and was sent to Vietnam, where he served from 1968 to 1970. He served in the Americal Division, a platoon of which participated in the infamous My Lai Massacre. O'Brien has said that when his unit got to the area around My Lai (referred to as "Pinkville" by the U.S. forces), "we all wondered why the place was so hostile. We did not know there had been a massacre there a year earlier. The news about that only came out later, while we were there, and then we knew." Upon completing his tour of duty, O'Brien went on to graduate school at Harvard University and received an internship at the "Washington Post". His writing career was launched in 1973 with the release of "If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home," about his war experiences. In this memoir, O'Brien writes: "Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories." For more on Tim and his work, Click Here.

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.

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.

Sara Roahen is a writer and oral historian whose work usually involves food, cooking, memory, and/or place. Not necessarily in that order. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Chile Pepper, Food & Wine, Wine & Spirits, Gourmet, and Oxford American magazines, as well as Best Food Writing 2003, Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue, and Food and Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast. Her book, Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table, was published by W. W. Norton in 2008. For more on
Sara and Gumbo Tales, Click Here.

Josh Russell was born Thanksgiving Day, 1968, in Carbondale, IL, and raised in Normal. Russell received his MFA from Louisiana State University and taught at LSU while working on his MFA. He now makes his home in Georgia, where he lives with his wife and daughter, and teaches creative writing at Georgia State University. His first novel, Yellow Jack (W.W. Norton, 1999), was shortlisted for the Barnes & Nobel Discover Great Writers Award. His second, My Bright Midnight (LSU Press, 2010), earned him a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose. A third novel is forthcoming in 2012 from Dzanc Books. Russell’s work has appeared in many anthologies, including New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, French Quarter Fiction, and Not Normal, Illinois, and in numerous literary magazines, most recently Epoch, Black Warrior Review, and Copper Nickel. For more on Josh and his new book, Click Here.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 2010: Fabulous Faculty!

Amazing Authors

Excellent Editors

Awesome Agents