Tom Wooten grew up outside of Boston and attended college at Harvard, which much to his embarrassment at the time, was a mere thirty minute bike ride away from his childhood home. For all four years of college, he and his roommate Utpal Sandesara worked to complete a narrative nonfiction account of the deadly flood that had washed away the industrial city of Morbi in India, where Utpal's family lived. After two months of field research in India, during which Tom was struck by the heavy handedness of government-led rebuilding efforts, he returned to the US with a burning desire to learn more about disaster recovery. Specifically, he sought ways in which survivors could take full control over rebuilding their lives and their communities. New Orleans beckoned. As a result of the criminally inadequate recovery assistance provided by the city, state, and federal governments, New Orleans neighborhoods had become remarkably organized, and were leading the city's rebirth. Tom traveled to New Orleans in 2007 to write his senior thesis, and returned after graduation in 2008 as the Disaster Recovery Research Fellow for the Harvard Kennedy School. After his fellowship, he taught 5th and 6th grade writing as a Teach for America corps member at KIPP McDonogh 15 School for the Creative Arts. "No One Had a Tongue to Speak" was published in May of 2011. His forthcoming book, "We Shall Not Be Moved: Rebuilding Home After Katrina," will be published by Beacon Press in the summer of 2012.