Biography

Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s work has appeared in Kenyon Review, AGNI, Callaloo, Massachusetts Review, Cicada, the New Delta Review, Green Mountains Review, The Pinch, Scars: An Anthology, Unfathomable City: a New Orleans Atlas edited by Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedecker, and has work forthcoming in AGNI. He is the winner of the 2014 Iowa Review Fiction Award, the 2014 So to Speak Journal Short Story Award, and the 2014 William Faulkner Competition for Novel in Progress.

Schedule

12:30 p.m. to 1:15 p.m.
State Capitol, House Committee Room 4
Discussion
New Orleans Noir

1:30 p.m. to 2:15 p.m.
Barnes & Noble Bookselling Tent
Book Signing

3 p.m. to 3:45 p.m.
State Capitol, House Committee Room 3
Discussion
Long Hidden Scars: Theme-Specific Anthologies

4 p.m. to 4:45 p.m.
Barnes & Noble Bookselling Tent
Book Signing

New Orleans Noir: The Classics (contributer)

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each volume comprises stories set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.

Classic reprints from: James Lee Burke, Armand Lanusse, Grace King, Kate Chopin, O. Henry, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Shirley Ann Grau, John William Corrington, Tom Dent, Ellen Gilchrist, Valerie Martin, O’Neil De Noux, John Biguenet, Poppy Z. Brite, Nevada Barr, Ace Atkins, and Maurice Carlos Ruffin.

From the introduction by Julie Smith:

"A glittering constellation of writers has passed through New Orleans—including Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, O. Henry, and even Walt Whitman, to name some of the not-so-usual suspects. Then there are the ones whose sojourns here are better known, the ones on whom we pride ourselves, such as Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Ellen Gilchrist, and James Lee Burke.

It was an anthologist’s feast—just about everybody who came to New Orleans wrote about it. But there were surprises as well . . .

If you’re from New Orleans, the neighborhood theme will resonate like Tibetan temple bells. And yet, surely every city has similar hoods, similar behavior patterns, similar travails—and has had them forever. ‘Indeed,’ wrote Voltaire, ‘history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.'”

Scars: An Anthology (contributor)

Scars: An Anthology examines the range and nuance of experience related to scars of the body. Through various genres and mediums, forty contributors address self-mutilation, creating art, gender confirmation surgery, cancer, birth, brain injury, war, coming of age, pain, and love, all focusing on the central question of what it means to live with physical scars.

"Each voice seeks to make sense of visible, tactile memories of pain, claiming scars as essential to the person they have become. Collectively, these voices give testimony to the connection between self-expression and resilience." —Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller and At the Will of the Body

"If scars are the memory of pain, then this volume is a body of those memories recollected as stories—stories as compelling, as vivid, as dramatic as the thing, the scar, itself." —Lisa Sanders, Yale School of Medicine, the doctor behind House, M.D. and New York Times “Diagnosis” Columnist

"[These] are important stories, necessary stories; the kind of stories that make us less alone in our own skin, less alone in our moments of fear and trauma and loss." –Arianne Zwartjes, Detailing Trauma: A Poetic Anatomy