Matthew Paul Smith is an instructor in the English Department at Tulane and specializes in 19th century American literature, particularly the literature of Louisiana. He has two forthcoming edited collections: The Cambridge Companion to New Orleans Literature (Cambridge UP) and Cross Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Japan: Foreigners Within the Samurai Class (Routledge). His recent…

Anaïs Umano is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the University of Lorraine in Nancy. Her dissertation, titled “Tennessee Williams’ Late Characters in Search of Actors,” focuses on Williams’ late plays and explores how actors can contribute to rehabilitating these works through performance. She proposes the concept of “plastic acting,” directly inspired by Williams’ notion of…

Rayna Nielsen is an indie bookseller and writer. She is the creator and host of Book Banter, a virtual event series and podcast. She is the Event Specialist at Blue Cypress Books in New Orleans, Louisiana, and she currently serves on the boards of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance and the Independent Bookseller Association of…

Katherine Fausset has worked in book publishing since 1998, starting at the Watkins/Loomis Agency. She joined Curtis Brown, Ltd. as an agent in 2006, where she is now a Senior Agent and a Vice President. She represents mainly literary and upmarket fiction, as well as select non-fiction. Her clients include multiple award-winning, national and international…

Ery Shin was born in Ames, Iowa, and raised in Manhattan for the first decade of her life, then Seoul for the second. The author of Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years, a study of Stein’s later experimental gestures and their philosophical implications within Hitler’s Europe, she is currently an assistant professor of English at the University…

Lurana Donnels O’Malley serves as Director of Graduate Studies in Theatre at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and has taught Euro-American theatre history, research, and directing there since 1991. O’Malley is the author of The Dramatic Works of Catherine the Great: Theatre and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Russia (2006). O’Malley has also published on topics…

Jacob Budenz is an author, multidisciplinary performer, musician and witch with an MFA from University of New Orleans and a BA from Johns Hopkins whose work focuses on the intersection of queer otherness and the otherworldly. The author of speculative short story collection Tea Leaves (Bywater Books 2023) and poetry chapbook Pastel Witcheries (Seven Kitchens…

Larry Bagneris, a native New Orleanian, began his civil rights activism as a student at St. Augustine High School. He graduated from Xavier University of Louisiana and moved to Houston, Texas, where he was a two-term president of the city’s Gay Political Caucus, chairperson of Gay Pride week, and, in 1979, founder of Houston’s Gay Pride…