Much of the story of Hurricane Katrina lived on the internet as the city reconnected during its diaspora. When Cynthia Joyce went looking for one vital account for a course she was teaching, she found the site down and the piece forgotten. This inspired her search for the works that became Please Forward: How Blogging Reconnected New Orleans After Katrina. Some of the writing included is famous and easily obtainable; a good percentage of the work is currently unavailable due to aging servers and broken links. Taken together, these pieces are powerful testament to the New Orleans blogging community who proved the internet could function as a crucial platform in a time of crisis. All contributors can be found on the publishers page.
Authors
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. Elizabeth McCracken (born 1966) is an American author. She is married to the novelist Edward Carey, with whom she has two children - August George Carey Harvey and Matilda Libby Mary Harvey. An earlier child died before birth, an experience which formed the basis for McCracken's memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. McCracken, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, graduated from Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts, and holds a degree in library science from Simmons College, a women's college in Boston. McCracken currently lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she is an artist-in-residence at Skidmore College. She is the sister of PC World magazine editor-in-chief Harry McCracken.
Praise for the Maureen Coughlin series: “Not only has Loehfelm created the most compelling, complex patrol cop in the genre—part take-no-prisoners badass, part too-sensitive-for-the street rookie—he has also re-energized New Orleans as a setting for the best in crime fiction, going well beyond the clichés … —edgy, dangerous, but pulsing with life. Maureen Coughlin is as good as it gets.” - BOOKLIST “After being warned about falling in love with the power of the job, [Maureen Coughlin] finds herself wrestling with ethical issues that fictional cops, especially fictional female ones, rarely talk about, leaving that stuff to real-life cops—and smart guys like Bill Loehfelm.” —The New York Times. "Our heroine has both a strong will and a finely tuned moral compass… Loehfelm has created a wonderfully flawed heroine in Coughlin… [Loehfelm’s] love for New Orleans is evident in his descriptions, from the greasy spoon the cops favor for gumbo to the rollicking frat bars of the French Quarter. Dialogue doesn't get much snappier, and the complicated plot ... is deftly handled. This series just keeps getting better." —Kirkus Bill is the author of seven novels, most recently, THE DEVIL'S MUSE, the new Maureen Coughlin novel, from Sarah Crichton Books/FSG. Bill's other novels are the stand-alone thrillers, FRESH KILLS (2008), and BLOODROOT (2009). Loehfelm lives in New Orleans with his wife, the writer AC Lambeth, where in addition to writing he plays drums in a band and practices yoga, both with mixed results.
