The 2025 Louisiana Book Festival will be held on Saturday, November 1.
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Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup Maurice Carlos Ruffin
© Clare Welsh

© Clare Welsh

2023 Louisiana Writer Award recipient Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, which was longlisted for the Story Prize and was a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and We Cast a Shadow, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University.

 

 

Schedule

9:00 am to 9:45 am

State Capitol, House Committee Room 5

Books Across America: A Road Trip Documentary

with Mason Engel, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and GennaRose Nethercott

 

Noon to 12:45 pm

State Capitol, House Chamber

The American Daughters

with Maurice Carlos Ruffin and moderator Megan Holt

 

1:00 pm to 1:45 pm

Cavalier House Books Tent

Book Signing

 

2:15 pm to 3:15 pm

State Capitol, House Committee Room 6

Literary New Orleans: A Documentary

with Peggy Scott Laborde, Dominic Massa, and Maurice Carlos Ruffin

The American Daughters: A Novel

Chosen as Louisiana's 2024 Great Read for Adults by the Louisiana Center for the Book
“An enthralling tale of a secret resistance movement run by Black women in pre-Civil War New Orleans.” — Time

“Stirring . . . In telling this important, neglected history with imagination-fueled research, The American Daughters offers an inspiring story of people who show a way forward with their perseverance, bravery and love.” — The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are inseparable. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days dreaming of a loving future and reminiscing about their family’s rebellious and storied history. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and directionless until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters. With the courage instilled in her by Sanite—and with help from these strong women—Ady learns how to put herself first. So begins her journey toward liberation and imagining a new future.

The American Daughters is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their freedom.