Miki Pfeffer
transcribes
letters of
writer Grace
King for
pleasure and
publication.
Her current edition, A New
Orleans Author in Mark Twain’s
Court: Letters from Grace King’s
New England Sojourns, grew out
of doctoral research for her award-
winning book, Southern Ladies and
Suffragists. Recently, she wrote an
afterword for a collection of critical
essays on King’s stories and urged
the rejuvenated volume of selected
works. A native of New Orleans,
Miki lives serenely on Bayou
Lafourche.
Felice Picano
is the author
of The Lure,
Like People
in History
(Ferro-
Grumley
Award for Best Gay Novel, 1966),
Nights at Rizzoli (Dirk Vanden
Award for Best Autobiography/
Memoir, 2015), and numerous
other short stories, essays, and
poems. He has also had four of his
plays produced. His latest book is
Justify My Sins: A Hollywood Novel
in Three Acts. Picano heads three
writing workshops and lectures
internationally on screenwriting and
Vintage Hollywood. He has won
a Violet Quill Life Achievement
Award from the Tennessee Williams
Festival, a Lifetime Achievement/
Pioneer Award from Lambda Literary
Foundation, and a Rainbow Key
Achievement Award from the City of
West Hollywood, where he lives.
Alisa Plant is
the director
of LSU
Press and
publisher of
The Southern
Review. She
holds a B.A. in English from the
University of Kansas and a Ph.D.
in history from Yale University. She
began freelancing for LSU Press in
1998 and joined the staff as a full-
time acquisitions editor in 2005. In
2015, she was named editor-in-chief
at the University of Nebraska Press,
where she worked until returning to
LSU Press as director in 2019.
John Pope, a
New Orleans
reporter since
1973, was a
member of
The Times-
Picayune’s
team that won two Pulitzer Prizes for
coverage of Hurricane Katrina and
its aftermath. He graduated from the
University of Texas. A contributing
writer to The Times-Picayune | The
New Orleans Advocate, Pope is the
author of an anthology of obituaries
and funeral stories titled Getting Off
at Elysian Fields, and is a co-author of
Building on the Past: Saving Historic
New Orleans.
Sister Helen
Prejean is
known for her
tireless work
against the
death penalty.
After serving
as spiritual advisor to several death
row inmates, she wrote the book
Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness
Account of the Death Penalty in the
United States, igniting a national
debate on capital punishment
and inspiring an Academy Award-
winning movie, a play, and an opera.
Sister Helen continues her work
educating the public, campaigning
against the death penalty, counseling
individual death row prisoners, and
working with murder victims’ family
members. Her most recent book is
River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey,
published in 2019.
Carmen
Luz Cosme
Puntiel,
Ph.D., is
an Assistant
Professor in
the Dept.
of Languages at Xavier University.
Her Ph.D. is in Hispanic Literature
and Linguistics from the University
of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a
co-editor of Demando mi libertad:
Mujeres negras y sus estrategias de
resistencia en la Nueva Granada,
Venezuela y Cuba, 1700-1800. Her
academic interests include Afro-
Latin American and Caribbean
Literature, the African Diaspora,
Afro-Portuguese studies, Gender
studies, translation/ transcription of
colonial archives, and Latin America’s
historiography.
Lori Rader-
Day is the
Edgar Award-
nominated
and Mary
Higgins
Clark Award-
winning author of Under a Dark Sky,
The Day I Died, Little Pretty Things,
and The Black Hour. She co-chairs
the mystery conference Murder and
Mayhem in Chicago and serves as
the national president of Sisters in
Crime. Her new book is The Lucky
One, set in a true-crime amateur
online sleuth community.
Katy
Reckdahl
is a New
Orleans-based
reporter,
a frequent
contributor
to the New Orleans Advocate | Times-
Picayune and WDSU television, and
a frequent writer for the New York
Times and The Weather Channel.
She has won dozens of first-place
awards from the New Orleans Press
Club and several national awards,
including a James Aronson Award
and a Casey Medal for Meritorious
Journalism. Most recently, she
received two Emmys for her work on
news documentaries for WDSU.
Gary
Richards is
Professor of
English and
Chair of the
Department
of English,
Linguistics, and Communication at
the University of Mary Washington.
He is the author of Lovers and
Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in
Southern Fiction, 1936-1961 as well
as numerous essays on southern
literature and culture including, most
recently, “Tennessee Williams and
the Burden of Southern Sexuality
Studies” and “Queering Welty’s
Male Bodies in the Undergraduate
Classroom.”
Anne Boyd
Rioux is the
author or
editor of six
books about
American
women
writers, including the Indie bestseller
Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little
Women and Why It Still Matters,
and one of the Chicago Tribune‘s
ten best books of 2016, Constance
Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady
Novelist. She is a professor of English
in New Orleans and the recipient
of two National Endowment for
the Humanities fellowships, one for
public scholarship. Her work has
been featured in the New York Times,
The New Yorker, and elsewhere.
Shearon
Roberts, Ph.D.,
is an assistant
professor of Mass
Communication
and African
American and Diaspora Studies
at Xavier University of Louisiana.
She teaches courses in converged
media and researches media
discourse of communities of color.
She is co-author of Oil and Water:
Media Lessons from Hurricane
Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon
Disaster (2014, University Press of
Mississippi) and co-editor of HBO’s
Treme and Post-Katrina Catharsis:
The Mediated Rebirth of New Orleans
(2017, Lexington Books).
Nathan J.
Robinson
is a leading
voice of
millennial left
politics. He
is the editor
of Current Affairs, a print magazine
of political and cultural analysis.
His work has appeared in The New
York Times, The Washington Post, The
Guardian, The New Republic, The
Nation, and elsewhere. A graduate
of Yale Law School, he is a Ph.D.
student in Sociology and Social Policy
at Harvard University, where his work
focuses on the U.S. criminal justice
system. Robinson is the author of Why
You Should Be a Socialist.
Leigh
Camacho
Rourks,
a Cuban-
American
author who
lives and
works in Central Florida, is an
Assistant Professor of English and
Humanities at Beacon College. Her
short story collection, Moon Trees
and Other Orphans, is forthcoming
in October 2019. She is the recipient
of the St. Lawrence Book Award,
the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner
Award, and the Robert Watson
Literary Review Prize. Her work has
appeared in a number of journals,
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MARCH
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