An Evening with TR Johnson in conversation with Michael Tisserand

Join us Wednesday, May 31st to celebrate TR Johnson’s latest book, New Orleans: A Writer’s City!

TR Johnson will be in conversation with Michael Tisserand.

A comprehensive literary history of New Orleans, one of the most storied cities in the world.

The neighborhoods of New Orleans have given rise to an extraordinary outpouring of important writing. Over the last century and a half or so, these stories and songs have given the city its singular place in the human imagination. This book leads the reader along five thoroughfares that define these different parts of town – Royal, St. Claude, Esplanade, Basin, and St. Charles – to explore how the writers who have lived around them have responded in closely related ways to the environments they share. On the outskirts of New Orleans today, the city’s precarious relation to its watery surroundings and the vexed legacies of race loom especially large. But the city’s literature shows us that these themes have been near to hand for New Orleans writers for several generations, whether reflected through questions of masquerade, dreams of escape, the innocence of children, or the power of money or of violence or of memory.

T. R. Johnson grew up in Louisville and has taught at universities there and in Boston. He is currently serves as Professor of English at Tulane. For nearly twenty five years, he has lived in the 9th Ward of New Orleans and hosted a contemporary jazz radio program at WWOZ 90.7 FM. He is the editor of New Orleans: A Literary History and the author of New Orleans: A Writer’s City.

Michael Tisserand‘s books include the Eisner Award-winning Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White; The Kingdom of Zydeco; Sugarcane Academy; and the photography collection My Father When Young. He is currently collaborating with Alison Fensterstock on a book about “Vic and Nat’ly” cartoonist Bunny Matthews for the Historic New Orleans Collection, and with zydeco musician and artist Dennis Paul Williams on a zydeco-themed children’s book for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press.