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Tom Piazza

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2026 Tom Piazza

2015 Louisiana Writer Award recipient Tom Piazza is celebrated both as a novelist and as a writer on American music. His most recent book is Living in the Present with John Prine, a memoir of his friendship with the great singer-songwriter. His 14 books also include Why New Orleans Matters and the novels The Auburn Conference and City of Refuge. He was a principal writer for the HBO drama series TREME, and the winner of a Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey.  He lives in New Orleans.

 

Schedule

Will be posted when available.

Living in the Present with John Prine

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

One of Billboard's "Ten Essential Music Books That Make Great Gifts"

“Part buddy comedy, part road story, part meditation on mortality.” ―Bob Mehr, New York Times

A vivid, joyful, moving window onto the life and heart of an American icon.

In the spring of 2018, Tom Piazza climbed into a 1977 Coupe de Ville with the great singer-songwriter John Prine to write an article for the Oxford American. Their Florida road trip ignited a deep friendship, full of tall tales over epic meals, long nights playing guitar and trading songs, and visits back and forth between their homes in Nashville and New Orleans. Along the way, Prine invited Piazza to work with him on a memoir, with John telling sprawling, often hilarious stories of his youth and family in Chicago and Kentucky, his breakthrough into the national spotlight, his riotous early years in the Nashville country scene, and much more. When Prine died suddenly of COVID in April 2020, that unfinished memoir evolved into an intimate and very personal narrative of the artist’s final years. In it, Piazza offers fans an unforgettable portrait of the beloved musician in his late glory―as a boyish cut-up, an epic raconteur, a great American poet, and, most important, a beloved friend.