2020 FESTIVAL PARTICIPANTS
Constance
Adler is the
author of
the memoir
My Bayou,
New Orleans
Through
the Eyes of a Lover. Her stories have
appeared in numerous publications
that include Oxford American, Utne
Reader, Spy Magazine, and Blackbird.
Her Gambit Weekly profile of Mardi
Gras float designer Henri Schindler
was honored by the Louisiana Press
Association with a first place award in
feature writing. She lives near Bayou
Saint John in New Orleans.
Allison
Alsup, co-
founder of the
New Orleans
Writers
Workshop,
teaches and
coaches fiction writers of all levels.
Her short stories have won multiple
awards, including A Room of Her
Own Foundation, New Millennium
Writings, Philadelphia Stories and the
Dana Awards. She was shortlisted
for the 2019 Manchester Fiction
Prize, England’s largest short story
competition. Her story, “Old
Houses,” first published in the New
Orleans Review, was selected for
inclusion in the 2014 O’Henry Prize
Stories.
Mahyar A.
Amouzegar is
the author of
three novels:
Dinner at
10:32, A
Dark Sunny
Afternoon and Pisgah Road. His short
story “Tell Me More” appeared in the
Anthology of Short Stories as part of
The Reading Corner Series. Mahyar
has been in love with literature
since he was a child in Tehran and
continued pursuing this passion
when he moved to San Francisco as
a teenager. He has lived and worked
on four different continents and
currently resides in New Orleans
with his wife and two daughters.
Tom Andes is co-founder of the
New Orleans Writers Workshop. His
writing has appeared in Best American
Mystery Stories
2012, Witness,
Xavier Review,
and numerous
other
publications.
He won the
2019 Gold Medal for Best Novel-
in-Progress from the Pirate’s Alley
Faulkner Society. He has taught
creative writing at San Francisco
State University, ADVANCE Camp
for Young Scholars, and elsewhere.
He lives in New Orleans, where he
works as a freelance writer and editor
and moonlights as a country singer.
Alys Arden is
the bestselling
author of
The Casquette
Girls series.
She was
raised by
street performers, tea leaf-readers,
and glittering drag queens of the
Vieux Carré. After graduating from
the University of New Orleans, she
lived in New York City and worked
internationally, travelling the world.
Her debut novel garnered over one
million reads online before it was
acquired by Skyscape. The fourth
book in the series, The Gates to
Guinée, is due for release in 2020.
Her debut graphic novel, Zatanna:
The Jewel of Gravesend, will be
published by DC Comics in 2021.
Jami
Attenberg
is the New
York Times
best-selling
author of
seven books
of fiction, including The Middlesteins
and All Grown Up. She has
contributed essays to the New York
Times Magazine, the Wall Street
Journal, the Sunday Times, and
Longreads, among other publications.
She lives in New Orleans.
Robert
Azzarello is
an Associate
Professor of
English at
Southern
University
at New Orleans. He is the author
32 TENNESSEE
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
WILLIAMS &
& NEW
NEW ORLEANS
ORLEANS LITERARY
LITERARY FESTIVAL
FESTIVAL
32
of Queer Environmentality: Ecology,
Evolution, and Sexuality in American
Literature (2012) and Three Hundred
Years of Decadence: New Orleans
Literature and the Transatlantic World
(2019).
C. Morgan
Babst is a
native of
New Orleans.
She studied
writing at Yale
and NYU,
and her essays and short fiction
have appeared in The Washington
Post, Saveur, The Oxford American,
Guernica, Garden and Gun, the
Harvard Review, Lenny Letter, and the
New Orleans Review, among others.
Her debut novel, The Floating World,
was named one of the Best Books of
2017 by Kirkus, Amazon, Southern
Living, and the Dallas Morning News
and was a New York Times Editors’ Pick.
Beth Bartley
made her
Broadway
debut in
the Tony-
nominated
play, Fortune’s
Fool, directed by Arthur Penn. She
can be seen in the upcoming Mike
Mills film Cmon Cmon, with Joaquin
Phoenix. In New Orleans, Beth
played Sam in When Lighting the
Voids, Blanche in A Streetcar Named
Desire, Pauline in Dividing the Estate,
Catherine in Suddenly Last Summer,
and Carol Cutrere in Orpheus
Descending. Beth is a graduate of The
Juilliard School.
Fredrick
Barton is
the award-
winning
author or
editor of
ten books,
including the novels The El
Cholo Feeling Passes, Courting
Pandemonium, With Extreme
Prejudice, and A House Divided,
which won the William Faulkner
Prize. His other books include the
essay collection Rowing to Sweden:
Essays on Faith, Love, Politics and
Movies, the jazz opera libretto
Ash Wednesday, the short fiction
anthology Monday Nights, and the
novel In the Wake of the Flagship.
John
Biguenet has
published his
short story
collection,
The Torturer’s
Apprentice:
Stories, his first novel, Oyster,
and eight other books, including
Interviews from the Edge (co-edited
with Mark Yakich)..Biguenet has
also written six plays that have been
widely produced, His stories have
been reprinted or cited in Prize
Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and
various other anthologies in the U.S.
and abroad. He is the Robert Hunter
Distinguished University Professor at
Loyola University in New Orleans.
George
Bishop, Jr.,
has lived
and taught
in Slovakia,
Turkey,
Indonesia,
Azerbaijan, India, and Japan. He’s
the author of the novels Letter to My
Daughter (Random House, 2010)
and The Night of the Comet (Random
House, 2013), which was chosen by
Kirkus Reviews as one of the year’s
“Best Books.” He’s currently finishing
a novel set in Jackson, Louisiana,
where he spent his childhood as the
son of a psychiatrist on the grounds of
the state mental hospital.
Mackie J.V.
Blanton
(M.S., Ph.D.
in Linguistics
at the Illinois
Institute of
Technology,
Chicago) has written essays on
linguistics, poetics, scientific and
technical discourse, Louisiana
dialects, and Sufi and Hasidic sacred
languages. His current research
in Critical Theory Linguistics
analyzes the nature and structure of
thought as a Sacriture suggested by
subtle, often subconscious thought
experiments or contemplative
thinking underlying the meditative
practice of language in scientific
discourse and literary expression. A