Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society: Words & Music Faculty

Gregory Anderson, MD, has for the last eight years worked for the U. S. Army in the Department of Family Medicine at Joint Base Fort Lewis-McCord, WA. His job has been to provide primary medical care for soldiers deploying to and returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as their families. Now in his 40th year of medical practice, Dr. Anderson grew up in the Mid-West in the 50s during the Korean conflict and was educated during the Vietnam conflict. He attended Yale University, graduating in 1967 with a BA in Asian History. He attended the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, graduating in 1971. He interned in Pediatrics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Then the Vietnam conflict caught up with him. He was drafted as a Navy doctor and spent two years on a submarine tender in San Diego, Portland and Bremerton. He has lived in the Northwest since 1975, spending 20 years in solo family practice before he began working for the Department of Defense. He is married. He and his wife Beth have six children, three boys and three girls. He will be presenting a paper on the care of military personnel returning from Middle East wars with post traumatic stress syndrome and severe disabilities incurred in battle and roadside bombings. His paper will address how in turn those who treat the devastating mental and physical injuries suffer post traumatic stress syndrome. He is scheduled to present on Thursday, November 18.

Reza Aslan, Ph.D, is an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, a frequent commentator on the Middle East for national television networks including CBS, NBC, and CNN. He is a contributing editor at the Daily Beast (thedailybeast.com) and regularly publishes commentaries on various new media. Aslan's first book is the international bestseller, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, which has been translated into 13 languages, and named one of the 100 most important books of the last decade. He is also the author of How to Win a Cosmic War (published in paperback as Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in a Globalized Age), and editor of the new anthology Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East, assembled under the auspices of Words Without Borders, to be released by Norton concurrent with Words & Music, 2010. Born in Iran, he now lives in Los Angeles where he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. For more on
Reza Aslan and his work, Click Here!

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.

Tad Bartlett was born in Ankara, Turkey, grew up in Selma, Alabama, and married into New Orleans, LA. He has no choice but to write. Tad is a 2010 finalist for the Shelby Foote Essay Prize in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. With his collaborator, J.Ed. Marston, he also has been on the short list for finalists in the novel category of the 2009 and 2010 Faulkner-Wisdom competitions. Tad is one of the founding members of the Peauxdunque Writers' Alliance, a multi-genre writers group formed under the auspices of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society's Words & Music Writers' Alliance. He is currently working on a series of poems entitled The Oil Wars. Tad will present two of these poems at the Writers' Alliance session, Wednesday afternoon, November 17, In his day job, he practices law, usually on the margins of those same oil wars.

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!

George Bishop is author of the recently released novel, A Letter to My Daughter, which at its core is a story of the collateral damage of war. The novel is narrated by a 50-year-old Baton Rouge housewife in a letter to her runaway daughter. The narrator recalls the letters she received from her young boyfriend, Tim, who signs up to fight during the Vietnam War because he's poor and has no other options. Says Bishop, "Though I’d hesitate to say that Letter to My Daughter is about Vietnam, I certainly believe that it is the Vietnam episodes which give the book its moral center." Bishop holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. After eight years of acting in commercials, stage plays, and guest starring roles in TV sitcoms, he traveled overseas and spent most of the last decade living and teaching in Slovakia, Turkey, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, India, and Japan. His stories and essays have appeared in publications such as The Oxford American, The Third Coast, Press, and American Writing. He now lives in New Orleans. This year, Bishop judged the Short Story by a High School Category of the William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. For more on George and his work, Click Here!

Robin Black holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her first story collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, is forthcoming from Random House in 2010. The book will also be brought out by six foreign publishers and translated into four languages. Robin Black’s stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications including The Southern Review, One Story, The Georgia Review, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. I (Norton, 2007). She is the recipient of grants from the Leeway Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Sirenland Conference and is also the winner of the 2005 gold medal for Best Short Story in the William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition, sponsored annually by the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society. Her work has been singled out for Special Mention by the Pushcart Prizes on four occasions and also deemed Notable in The Best American Essays, 2008 and The Best Nonrequired Reading, 2009. She is currently at work on a novel, also to be published by Random House and overseas. Since receiving her MFA, she has taught Advanced Fiction Writing at Arcadia University and worked extensively with individual students. In 2010, she will be teaching at Bryn Mawr College. Photo by Marion Ettlinger. For more on Robin Black and her new book, 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 artists. 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. Roy will be the toastmaster for Faulkner for All this year, giving in his inimitable style his original running commentary for a screening of Duck Soup. For more on Roy and his impressive body of work, Click Here!

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.

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. For more on Rosemary Daniell and her work, Click Here!

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.

Beth Ann Fennelly, a native of New Jersey who grew up in Lake Forest, IL, obtained her B.A. magna cum laude in 1993 from the University of Notre Dame. After graduation, Ms. Fennelly

taught English in a coal-mining village on the Czech/Polish border. When she returned to the States, she earned the M.F.A. degree in poetry from the University of Arkansas and then received the 1999 Diane Middlebrook Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin and an Illinois Arts Council Grant. She taught poetry at Knox College in Galesburg, IL. and currently teaches English at the University of Mississippi, where she lives with her husband, award-winning fiction writer Tom Franklin, and their children. Her chapbook, A Different Kind of Hunger, published by the Texas Review Press, won the 1997 Texas Review Breakthrough Award. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and Tri Quarterly; they have been anthologized Poets of the New Century, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English,, The Best American Poetry 1996, The Pushcart Prize 2001 and others. Fennelly's book of poems, Open House, and other works have won numerous awards, including the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry. Open House was a Book Sense Top Ten poetry picks. Her 2004 book, Tender Hooks, was published by W. W. Norton & Company. In 2002, Ms. Fennelly was among only 38 writers to receive the National Endowment for the Arts Grant. Hers is a notable Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. There were 1,600 applicants and each of the 28 winning fellows received $20,000, which gave her the opportunity to concentrate on completing and polishing Tender Hooks. Recent books of poetry include The Kudzu Chronicles and Unmentionables: Poems. In the last several years she has expanded her horizons and has become an exceptional essayist. Her collection of essays, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother was published recently to critical acclaim. Ms. Fennelly judged the Essay Category of the 2010 William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. For detailed information on Ms. Fennelly, her work, and accomplishments, Click Here! Ms. Fennelly is an important role model for poets and creative non-fiction writers seeking to improve their work and get it published

Randy Fertel has taught English at the university level at Harvard, Tulane, LeMoyne College, the University of New Orleans, and most recently with the Graduate Faculty of the New School

University. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard where he received a teaching award bestowed by student vote. A specialist in the literature of the Vietnam War, he organized a major conference called My Lai 25 Years After: Facing the Darkness, Healing the Wounds, at Tulane University in 1994. The initiative received both a Special Humanities Award from the Louisiana Endowment for Humanities and an Addy Award for a direct-mail promotion piece he designed. A former manager of Ruth’s Chris Steak House in New Orleans, he remembers interrupting high school homework (or whatever it was he did as a teenager) to make emergency bread runs when the restaurant ran out. He also served as Director of Marketing for the national corporation before he returned to teaching in 1991. Randy currently heads the Fertel Foundation, which supports projects related to the arts and education. It has a special interest in initiatives from which new communities and new insights may emerge and those that challenge entrenched communities of power. One such project, the Ron Ridenhour Prizes for Courageous Truth Telling, is co-sponsored by the Nation Institute. Award ceremonies are held every spring at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. The New Orleans-based foundation, established in 1999, also helps rebuild a better New Orleans – and create national models – in a post-Katrina world. He is also president of the Ruth U. Fertel Foundation, which is devoted to education in the New Orleans area. Randy leads the Task Force that brought Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard to the Samuel J. Green School and another for Artist Corps, which is putting musicians back in New Orleans schools. A lover of fine wines and fine food, Randy has long been dining out on the stories that make up his book The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steaks: A New Orleans Memoir, forthcoming from The University Press of Mississippi, the tale of two distinctive people, his parents, and their fascinating worlds.

Tom Franklin (Thomas G. Franklin) is the author of the new novel, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, just released (Fall, 2010). It is touted by Shutter Island author Dennis Lehane, who was a headliner for Words & Music, 2010, this way: " A new Tom Franklin novel is always a reason to get excited, but Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is more—a cause for celebration. What a great novel by a great novelist." Franklin is author of the critically acclaimed Poachers, a collection of short fiction which won the Edgar Allen Poe Award, and two earlier novels, Smonk and Hell at the Breech. He was born in t Dickinson, AL, and later moved with his family to nearby Mobile to attend the University of South Alabama, where he graduated with a 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 thereafter, 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. For more on Tom and his work, Click Here!

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 was executive editor at the magazine until June, 2010, when he ws promoted to managing editor. He 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, 2009 issue of Playboy, on the inimitable Louisiana oyster. Playboy is an American men's magazine, founded in Chicago, IL by Hugh Hefner in 1953. The magazine has a long history of publishing short stories as well as monthly interviews of notable public figures, such as artists, architects, economists, composers, conductors, film directors, journalists, novelists, playwrights, religious figures, politicians, athletes and race car drivers. Of course, salacious pictures of women are included in every issue, too. For More on Froehlich and Playboy Press, Click Here!

Zachary J. George is finishing his thesis in preparation to earn an MFA in fiction writing from the University of New Orleans. This project, a novel called Four Days to the Mile, follows the life of an Amerasian born in Vietnam in 1967 up through 2002. George has taught English in South Korea, Vietnam, and Prague. It was during his travels in 2002 that he first became interested in the Vietnamese people and the strength of their character. George worked on Voices Rising and Voices Rising II as assistant editor to Rebeca Antoine. He also gathered stories for the two books through interviews with victims of Hurricane Katrina. George’s short story What Cats Do is forthcoming in the fall issue of Inkwell Journal. He worked for Faiyo Magazine in Prague, writing a bi-weekly story for each issue and has just begun a gardening column for Nola Defender, a new online magazine focusing on New Orleans.

Julia Glass won the National Book Award for Three Junes, her debut work of fiction. Three Junes is a novel composed of three linked novellas, one of which, Collies, won the Faulkner Society's gold medal for Best Novella in 2000. This year she is judge of the novella category in the Society's literary competition. Her second novel, The Whole World Over, which revolved in many respects around the author's love of food, was highly praised by critics. Her third book, I See You Everywhere, also a critical success is was an intimate and personal exploration of the intertwined lives of two sisters, focusing on the complicated emotions — love, hate, envy, grief — that form between female siblings, a candid portrait of two women which reveals the very nature of sisterhood. In her foruth book, The Widower's Tale, coming in September, is another study in the complexities of human relationships, connections. in a quirky farmhouse outside Boston, 70-year-old Percy Darling enjoys a vigorous but mostly solitary life. Then, in a complex scheme to help his oldest daughter through a crisis, he allows a progressive preschool to move into his barn. The abrupt transformation of Percy’s rural refuge into a lively, youthful community compels him to re-examine the choices he’s made since his wife’s death, three decades ago, in a senseless accident that haunts him still. No longer can he remain aloof from his neighbors, his two grown daughters, or, to his shock, the precarious joy of falling in love. Ms. Glass has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her short fiction has won several prizes, including the Tobias Wolff Award. She lives with her family in Massachusetts.Photo by Peter Ross. Click Here for more on Julia and her exceptional work.

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.

Kristin Kelly is an English professor at Gainesville State College in Gainesville, GA. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in English from Georgia State University. Her primary research interest is the literature of the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She currently is offering a new composition class entitled The Combat Experience in American Literature. In late 2009, Kristin received a grant to begin work on an interview collection entitled Listen: Combat Veterans Speak. This project collects interviews from combat veterans of the current wars to be published in both print and electronic form. She has published in The South Atlantic Review and Green Leaves: The Journal of the Barbara Pym Society. She lives in Gainesville with her husband and two children. Dr. Kelly will present a paper entitled: Searching for Mercy Street: Tim O’Brien’s Norman Bowker and the Literature of PTSD. Her talk will be on Saturday.

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). For more on Stanley Lombardo, Click Here!

Christopher Love currently is a third-year candidate for a PhD in

Literature at the University of Southern Mississippi, concentrating in modern American and British literature. While attending Louisiana State University in 2005, Chris’s frequent trips down I-10 to the Big Easy inspired his New Orleans-set novel Crescent Garden (Evermore, 2007). He also has presented and published papers on such diverse writers as Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, John Updike, and William Wells Brown. Chris is a veteran of the US Marine Corps. A native of another great music town, Memphis, TN, Chris is an avid guitarist. He also enjoys travel with his wife, Evelyn. They live in Hattiesburg, MS. Chris is among academics whose proposals for papers related to the theme of Words & Music, 2010 have been accepted. He will present on Sunday, November 21 following Literature & Lunch Five.
The topic of his presentation will be: From Soldiers’ Pay to A Fable: Faulkner’s Art of War.

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.

Simon Mawer, a critically acclaimed British fiction writer, is author of eight novels and two non fiction books. His latest novel, The Glass Room, published by Little, Brown in January, is shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize and two other British prizes, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Wingate Prize. The next novel, provisionally entitled Trapeze, is underway. Mawer is also an accomplished essayist and he has published poetry in Eastern Europe. Born in England in 1948, Mawer grew up in England, Cyprus, and Malta. He went to boarding school at Millfield, In Somerset, UK and to the Oxford University, Brasenose College. His first publication was the novel, Chimera. He currently teaches in Italy and lives near Rome with his wife Connie and their two children, Matthew and Julia. Of his background he says: “My father, like his father before him, served in the Royal Air Force. We lived the nomadic life of a typical military family, spending, amongst various moves in England, three years in Cyprus during the EOKA period and a total of five years in Malta. These experiences planted in me a love of the Mediterranean world which has lasted my whole life. They also gave me a taste for exile which I have never lost. When people ask me where I come from I am still unable to reply. I have lived in Italy for more than three decades, but Italy is not home. Home is where the mind is, perhaps. From the age of eight I was educated in boarding schools, an experience I loathed at first but later came to enjoy. Above all it forced upon me the need to preserve a secret, interior world in a society where privacy was at a premium, training that was surely significant in the development of a writer.” For more on Simon Mawer and his work, Click Here!

Linda Watanabe McFerrin—poet, travel writer, and novelist, contributor to numerous newspapers, magazines and anthologies, author of two poetry collections, past editor of a popular Northern California guidebook, winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction— is the founder of Left Coast Writers® and has led workshops in Greece, France, Italy, Ireland, Central America, and the United States. She has mentored a long list of accomplished writers toward publication. Her novel, Namako: Sea Cucumber, was named Best Book for the Teen-Age by the New York Public Library. In addition to authoring an award-winning short story collection, The Hand of Buddha, she has co-edited several anthologies, including the Hot Flashes: Sexy Little Stories & Poems series. Her latest novel, Dead Love, which was short-listed as a 2007 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition finalist, will be published in September. Linda has judged the San Francisco Literary Awards, the Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence and the Kiriyama Prize, served as a visiting mentor for the Loft Mentor Series, has been guest faculty at the Oklahoma Arts Institute, is a past NEA panelist, and has been a juror for the Marin Literary Arts Council. She will conduct a limited registration workshop, Love Makes the Literary World Go Round during Words & Music, 2010. For more on Linda and her new novel,
Dead Love, Click Here!

Sena Jeter Naslund is author of the novels Sherlock in Love, The Animal Way to Love , Ahab's Wife, Four Spirits, Abundance, Adam and Eve ; and two collections of stories: Ice Skating at the North Pole and The Disobedience of Water. Her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review (where she won the Lawrence Prize in fiction), The Indiana Review, and The Alaska Quarterly Review. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. Special honors include the Harper Lee Award and the Southeastern Library Association Fiction Award. A native of Birmingham, AL, she is a graduate of Birmingham-Southern College. She became a serious student of writing after attending the Breadloaf Writers' Conference while an undergraduate. She received her MA and PhD degrees in creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa. In 1971 she was hired as a Visiting Professor in the MFA program at the University of Montana. The following year, she accepted a teaching position at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, where she directed the creative writing program and was awarded the university's first Distinguished Teaching Professor honor. Currently she is Writer in Residence at the University of Louisville, program director of the Spalding University brief-residency MFA in Writing, and is Kentucky Poet Laureate. She also is the editor of the Louisville Review and the Fleur-de-Lis Press (both founded by her in 1976). She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, and has a daughter, Flora Naslund, who is a student in the Bachelor of Fine Arts Program at the University of Louisville. For more on Ms. Naslund, Click Here! Photo by Marion Ettlinger.

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, MN, 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 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.

Stewart O' Nan, whose latest novel Emily, Alone will be released in March, 2011, is the author

of 15 critically acclaimed books of fiction and two books of creative non-fiction. His novels include The Names of the Dead, which has been described as one of the very best post-Vietnam war novels, completely on point for the theme of Words & Music, 2010, which is The Literature of War & Collateral Damage. In The Names of the Dead Vietnam veteran Larry Markham, already burdened by decades of guilt and by his attempts to salvage his unhappy marriage, finds himself and his family stalked by an even more troubled veteran, an ex-Special Forces psychopath named Creeley. The novel alternates the present-day story with chapters detailing Markham's Vietnam experience. The realism and power of these sequences are especially notable as O'Nan was still a child when the war ended.He was a writer-in-residence and taught creative writing at Trinity College in nearby Hartford from 1995 to 1997. The research he did for The Names of the Dead led to the creation of a class that studied Vietnam War memoirs as a form of literature, which he also initially taught at Trinity. Also very much on point is his anthology, The Vietnam Reader, the premiere compilation of literary art inspired by the Vietnam War. Both books are recommended for reading in advance of the conference. His novels also include the best-selling Last Night at the Lobster and A World Away and A Prayer for the Dying, both New York Times Notable Books. His first novel, Snow Angels, recently made into a well-received independent film, won the Faulkner Society's Gold Medal for Best Novel in 1993, the same year he received the Drue Heinz Prize for Short Fiction for his short fiction collection, In The Walled City. The awards prompted a two-book contract with Doubleday, which put him on the track to literary success. His well received non-fiction works include: The Circus, about a famously horrific fire in Connecticut, and The Faithful, co-authored with Stephen King, the story of the Boston Red Sox and their 2004 season. In addition to 12 novels published under his own name, O'Nan has published spy thrillers under the pen name James Coltrane. The diversity of his writing career as well as the divergent paths each of his novels has taken, make Stewart a perfect role model for developing writers to study carefully. To find out more about O'Nan and his impressive body of work, Click Here!

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, Click Here!

Maurice Ruffin, a native New Orleanian, is a founding member of the Peauxdunque Writers' Alliance, a multi-genre writers group formed under the auspices of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society's Words & Music Writers' Alliance. Maurice is first runner-up for the Short Story Prize in the 2010 William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for his story The Pie Man. Maurice was also a finalist for two other short stories Abracadabra in 2009 and Fit in 2010. Currently, he is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. Maurice also practices law with the New Orleans firm of Adam & Reese. He will read a short excerpt from the The Pie Man at the Writers' Alliance Session, Wednesday afternoon, November 17.

Josh Russell was born Thanksgiving Day, 1968, in Carbondale, IL, and raised in Normal, IL. 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.

Kathryn Pratt Russell, Ph.D. is among academics who will be presenting papers during Words & Music, 2010. She will be discussing Lord Byron's fascination with the 19th century wars between the Orthodox Christians and the muslims and the inspiration of these wars on his work. Dr. Russell is an Associate Professor of English at Clayton StateUniversity, where she teaches Romantic Literature and Critical Theory. As a child of military parents, Russell grew up in the Philippines and Britain, as well as in many Southern U.S. states. At the age of 13, she moved to north Louisiana, where she spent her teen years. At 16, she enrolled in a publicly-funded boarding school for gifted and talented students, the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts, where a gifted teacher, Dr. Art Williams, introduced her to Byron's poetry. At LSU, she met her husband, the novelist Josh Russell, author of Yellow Jack (1999) and My Bright Midnight (2010). Josh is also presenting at Words & Music this year. Kathryn earned her Ph.D. in Literature at Vanderbilt University, where she completed a dissertation on melancholia and Romantic culture. Kathryn became interested in the poetry of contemporary war poet Brian Turner after reading an article about him on the NPR website. She has published scholarly articles, poetry, and short fiction in nationally recognized journals including Studies in Romanticism, Black Warrior Review, and Chelsea. Kathryn is pictured here with the Russells' literary poodle Adiel, named after the faithful seraph in Milton. For more on Dr. Russell and her paper, Click Here!

Brian Schneider, who will be presenting a paper on the Literature of War & Collateral Damage during Words & Music, 2010, is a former U.S. Air Force Sergeant, former military contractor, and veteran of the American war in Afghanistan. He grew up in the small town of St. Helen in northern Michigan and has also lived in Italy and Canada. He holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from the University of Maryland and a Master of Arts Degree in English from the University of British Columbia. He currently is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of British and American Studies at the University of Constance in Germany where he focuses on contemporary American war writing. In addition, he teaches English courses at U.S. military installations in Europe for the University of Maryland University College. His fiction has appeared in several magazines and he is currently working to publish his first novel, This is Squalorville, about his experiences with the war in Afghanistan and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. The topic of the paper he will be presenting is Tell it one more time”: Repetition as “truth” in Tim O’Brien’s
The Things They Carried.

Rob Magnuson Smith was raised in Worcestershire, England and in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. He was graduated from Pitzer College in Claremont, CA on a Chevron Foundation Merit Scholarship with a double major in philosophy and psychology. His début novel The Gravedigger won the Faulkner Society’s 2004 Gold Medal for Best Novel(judged by André Bernard) and is published this Fall by the University of New Orleans Press and is being launched by UNO on opening night of Words & Music. A former Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Rob has had short fiction published in Inkwell Magazine, Karamu, Asphodel, Fiction International, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. In England his fiction appears in Notes from the Underground and is forthcoming in The Reader, New Writing, and Cant Books. Rob is the 2009-2010 David Higham Scholar at the University of East Anglia in the University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. He divides his time between England and San Francisco. He is represented by Clare Alexander (Aitken, Alexander Associates) and is currently working on a second novel about love and death in rural Sussex. For more information on Rob's book, Click Here!

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

Terri Stoor of New Orleans is a founding member of the Peauxdunque Writers' Alliance,founded by poet and film director Amy Serrano under the auspices of the Faulkner Society as the New Orleans chapter of the Words & Music Writers' Alliance. Her short story, Float, is on the Short List for Finalists in the short story category of the 2010 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. When not writing, she divides her time between the office of a national women’s organization, taming her daughters, and teaching her Labrador retriever to smile on command. She will present short fiction entitled War Story at the Wednesday, November
18 session of the Writers' Alliance during Words & Music.

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.

Steve Yates is author of the new Civil War novel, Morkan’s Quarry, released

in early summer, 2010. An MFA graduate from the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas, his fiction has won two fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission and one from the Arkansas Arts Council. Portions of Morkan’s Quarry first appeared in Missouri Review, Ontario Review, and South Carolina Review. A novella-length excerpt was a finalist for the Faulkner Societyís William Faulkner — William Wisdom Award for Best Novella. Yates is a native of Springfield, MO, where his novel is set. His book was published by Moon City Press, a new press recently created to zero in on work related to Missouri and Ozark Mountains. The press is operated by the Departments of English and Design at the University of Missouri. His short fiction has appeared in Texas Review, Turnstile, Nebraska Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and other journals. He is assistant director / marketing director at University Press of Mississippi in Jackson and lives in Flowood with his wife Tammy.Steve will appear at Words & Music on Friday, November 19 do discuss how the Civil War dehumanized the South and Border States with acclaimed Civil War novelist Howard Bahr. For more on Steve Yates and his book, Click Here.

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Words & Music 2010: Fabulous Faculty!

Amazing Authors