Joshua Wheeler is the author of the essay collection Acid West, and a novel, The High Heaven. Acid West was a best book of 2018 for Newsweek, The Paris Review, and others. The High Heaven was included in Electric Lit‘s best novels of 2025. Wheeler teaches at Louisiana State University. Originally from Alamogordo, New Mexico,…

Martin Sherman was born in Philadelphia, raised in New Jersey, and educated at Boston University. He has lived in London for over forty years. His plays have been produced in over sixty countries and include Passing By, Cracks, Rio Grande, Bent, Messiah, When She Danced, A Mad House in Goa, Some Sunny Day, Rose, Onassis,…

Robert Olen Butler has published nineteen novels and six volumes of short stories, one of which, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Among his many other awards, in 2013 he won the career-spanning F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. His latest work is the…

Gideon Glick is the co-artistic director of Blue Roses Project in New Orleans. Broadway: To Kill a Mockingbird (Tony nomination), Significant Other (Drama League Nomination), Spider-Man, and Spring Awakening. TV: Etoile, for which he also served as a writer, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Other Two, American Horror Story: NYC, 9-1-1: Nashville, The Detour, Devious…

Charles Chamberlain is a historian, tour guide, museum professional, and musician. He specializes in the history, music, and cultures of Louisiana, the United States, Latin America, and the Mediterranean Basin. Chamberlain is the author of New Orleans: A Concise History of an Exceptional City (LSU Press, 2025), as well as Victory at Home: Manpower and…

Molly Mitchell is Ethel & Herman L. Midlo Endowed Chair and Gordon Mueller Professor of Public History at UNO, where she directs the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies.  She is author of Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery and has published online for Slate, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and…

Thomas Mallon is the author of eleven novels, including Henry and Clara, Fellow Travelers and Up with the Sun. His nonfiction books include Mrs. Paine’s Garage and, most recently, The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994, which Kirkus Reviews called “Funny, sad, witty, horrible, and beautiful … An exquisitely evocative glimpse into an…

Christine Ma-Kellams is a Harvard-trained cultural psychologist, Pushcart-nominated fiction writer, and first-generation American. When not writing, she is an associate professor of psychology at San Jose State University, program coordinator for its Masters in Experimental Psychology program, and a regular contributor to Psychology Today. Her essays and short stories have appeared in HuffPost, Chicago Tribune,…

Jordan LaHaye Fontenot’s work has appeared in Oxford American, Atlas Obscura, and others. She has presented her work at the Society of Professional Journalists Conference, the Louisiana Book Festival, the Delta Mouth Literary Festival, the Eudora Welty Writers Symposium, and others. The managing editor of Country Roads magazine, she lives in Lafayette, Louisiana. Her first…