Featured Authors & Panelists in Brief - G
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Ernest J. Gaines authored A Lesson before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman as well as other novels, short stories and essays. A Lesson before Dying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, was an Oprah Book Club pick in 1997 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2004, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature. In 2013, Gaines received a National Medal of Arts.
As a photographer, Daymon Gardner “shoots people for a living.” He received his degree in mass communication from Louisiana State University and studied photography at the Creative Circus in Atlanta. He resides in New Orleans with his wife Erin and their dog Humphrey.
Marcia Gaudet lives in Duson, La., and is a professor emerita in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is the author of Carville: Remembering Leprosy in America.
With 13 years and seven albums, singing in a voice that “channels Johnny Cash's last days,” Mary Gauthier has established a reputation as one of America’s finest songwriters. Her album The Foundling resonated around the world and was named in many year-end top album lists in 2010. Music critic James Reed ranked the album at the top of The Boston Globe's survey, describing it as "her most revealing album … a heartbreaking work of powerful storytelling, a blueprint for how modern country records could — and should — sound."
Recipient of the 2009 Louisiana Writer Award, Tim Gautreaux authored three novels and two collections of stories. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Harper's Magazine and Zoetrope as well as in volumes of the O. Henry and the Best American Short Story annuals. Gautreaux is professor emeritus in the creative writing program at Southeastern Louisiana University. He lives with his family in Hammond, La.
Rebecca Willman Gernon has been published in Fiction365, Bylines Magazine, Thrivent, Over My Dead Body, The Weeder's Digest and several anthologies including All My Good Habits I Learned from Grandma and Love is a Verb. Her plays have won awards in Virginia, Missouri and Louisiana. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Nebraska. For the past 13 years, she has called New Orleans home.
Deirdre Gogarty is a native of Drogheda, Ireland, who moved to the U.S. to pursue her dream of becoming a champion boxer. Her journey led her from illegally boxing with men in Drogheda and Dublin boxing clubs to training in a shack in Louisiana. Eventually, she was crowned Women’s International Boxing Federation featherweight champion. Gogarty is a successful graphic artist and coaches at the Ragin’ Cajun Boxing Club. She lives with her husband near Lafayette.
Manuel Gonzales completed the Columbia University graduate creative writing program. He has published fiction and nonfiction in Open City, Fence, One Story, Esquire, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and The Believer. He is the executive director of the Austin Bat Cave, a nonprofit creative writing center for students ages 6 to 18. The Miniature Wife and Other Stories is his first book. He lives with his wife and two children in Austin.
Born in New Orleans, Shirley Ann Grau's work is set primarily in the Deep South and explores issues of race and gender. She spent much of her childhood in rural Alabama with her mother. Grau graduated in 1950 from Newcomb College of Tulane University. Her 1964 saga The Keepers of the House was awarded the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Claudia Gray began her writing career with the Evernight series, which includes four young adult novels set in an eerie, gothic boarding school. The Evernight series has received critical acclaim from national media, earned Claudia the title of New York Times bestseller and jumpstarted her career. Though she has worked as a lawyer, journalist, disc jockey and poor waitress, she now writes full time. She resides in New Orleans.
Grandpa Gray never thought he would tell children's stories. He wrote books and plays for adults and was a professor at a university. But when his grandchildren demanded stories, he said, "Once upon a time..." The next thing you know, there it was: The Land of the Three Elves.
Tara T. Green graduated from Dillard University and Louisiana State University. She is professor and director of African-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In addition to publishing numerous articles and two edited books, she authored A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men, winner of the 2011 National Council for Black Studies Outstanding Scholarship Award. She is completing a manuscript on New Orleans writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson.
Erin M. Greenwald is curator and historian at The Historic New Orleans Collection. Since joining THNOC in 2007, she has edited and contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues and books, including In Search of Julien Hudson: Free Artist of Color in Pre-Civil War New Orleans and A Company Man: The Remarkable French-Atlantic Voyage of a Clerk for the Company of the Indies. She received her doctorate in history from Ohio State University.
Ricardo Guthrie, assistant professor of ethnic studies at Northern Arizona University, examines political narratives of the black press and writes about cinema as cultural political artifacts. Recent publications include an essay, Hollywood's Africa after 1994, on minstrelsy and racial myths in The Last King of Scotland and an article on art and community building in desegregated neighborhoods, The International Journal of Social, Political and Community Agendas in the Arts: 2013.
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