The 2024 Louisiana Book Festival Poster, with artwork by Kelly A. Mueller.
This year’s Louisiana Book Festival, held Saturday, November 2, celebrates two magnificent decades of elevating literary pursuits in the state. Renowned for bringing scores of authors, scholars, and poets of all stripes to the heart of Baton Rouge for panels, signings, and discussions, the free festival honors the storied legacy of great Louisiana writers, all while supporting the newest crop to grace national bestseller lists and small university press promotions alike.
We’ve combed through the list of featured Louisiana authors to offer you a sampling of some of the most exciting homegrown talent producing bright new works of fiction and memoir. These books run the gamut, from historical speculative fiction and pre-Civil War sabotage, to unorthodox Westerns unfolding in the not-so-distant future. They also include a memoir of an evocative New Orleans upbringing and another on the ravaging of the coronavirus pandemic, written in the tradition of the past’s plague narratives. Each book has Louisiana in common as a setting, a character in itself playing many roles—from a vibrant and thrumming new world to a heat-soaked land of contradictions. So pick out your favorite tote bag big enough to carry all the books on your wishlist. We’ve got you covered.
The Great State of West Florida
By Kent Wascom
It’s 2026, and Louisiana is hotter than ever. Thirteen-year-old Rally, living with his brutal adoptive family, confronts the unforgiving climate amid fevered discussions of civil war and the rumbles of a far-right politician seeking to transform the Florida panhandle into a white Christian ethnostate. The strange and troubled legacy of Rally’s dead father’s West Floridian family, which once led a botched rebellion to create their own state, underpins this explosive bildungsroman—a storied history co-opted by the politician eager to redraw existing maps.
Soon, Rally is unceremoniously sucked into the drama of West Florida when his Uncle Rodney, one of the only survivors of that failed effort, takes him on a wild journey to the sun-drenched panhandle. Along the way, they ally with “Governor,” a woman driven relentlessly by her vision for West Florida—all while Rally is falling for a girl wielding a machine gun. During his adventure along the bloody Gulf Coast, replete with robotic warriors and megachurches, Rally faces his family’s violent past and learns what it means to preserve a legacy. From a writer who has been compared to Cormac McCarthy and Joyce Carol Oates comes a sharp and irreverent Western following one boy’s coming-of-age against the backdrop of territorial vengeance.
Season of the Swamp
By Yuri Herrera, translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman
For eighteen months, Benito Juárez—who would one day become the president of Mexico and ultimately the country’s national hero—haunted the bustling port city of New Orleans. Season of the Swamp seeks to fill in the gaps where the historical record is silent about Juárez’s year-and-a-half in the sunken city, imagining him as a young exile who finds himself captured by all the vibrancy and villainy of the roiling metropolis.
In 1853, Juárez is an anonymous migrant disembarking in New Orleans, joined by fellow exiles scheming to return to Mexico and topple its dictatorship. Immersing himself in the city and falling easily into its rhythm, Juárez and his fellow exiles work odd jobs, fall ill with yellow fever, suffer a stifling southern summer, and learn to love the music and food that define New Orleans culture. Yet, they also witness the seedy underbelly of the city that traffics in human beings. In this extraordinary work of speculative fiction, Yuri Herrera writes a Juárez informed by his experiences in this strange, sultry, polyglot city, building a brief history to define the man he would become in a few short years, when he returned to his homeland.
The American Daughters
By Maurice Carlos Ruffin
In this gripping saga detailing an underground resistance movement led by Black women in pre-Civil War New Orleans for the Union cause, curious Ady finds herself devastated, separated from her mother. The two are enslaved, owned by a businessman in the French Quarter, and together often dreamt of a different life and hopeful future. After they are torn apart, Ady is adrift until she meets and befriends a free Black woman at the Mockingbird Inn. Under her guidance, Ady joins a circle of spies called the Daughters who seek to undermine the Confederates. With newfound strength and bravery, Ady begins her journey toward freedom.
The American Daughters, by decorated author and LSU creative writing professor Maurice Carlos Ruffin, has garnered positive attention since its publication earlier this year, receiving acclaim from critics and editors with The New York Times. Ruffin’s novel uplifts a little-known part of the Civil War, highlighting the women who risked their lives as saboteurs and spies for the Union. Daughters explores what happens when a community joins forces to fight for liberation.
Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy
By Brooke Champagne
This raucous and emotional romp of a debut memoir compiles essays from author Brooke Champagne’s New Orleans upbringing—a coming-of-age complicated by the warring factions of different ethnicities, classes, languages, and educations. Her girlhood is marked and muted early on by her Ecuadorian grandmother’s harsh strictures: grow up to be beautiful and know when to use it; love in Spanish—God’s first language; and if she must write, make her grandmother a subject. Already, Champagne knew she had violated these dictums—and would continue to do so—as a writer and child seeking an identity and authenticity apart from the harsh constraints of various expectations. She would also hide them, burying the truth of her becoming.
Champagne, an assistant professor in the MFA program at the University of Alabama and an award-winning essayist, explores the nuances of a childhood filled with fierce family ties, allegiance to cultural connections, and the necessary breaking of cherished rules in the search to find oneself. At the heart of Champagne’s writings is her family and their fraught and tragic relationships shaped by love, hate, curses, prayers, and secret-spilling. In Champagne’s telling, they discover that behind the stories they tell about themselves, their connections are what make them human and alive to each other.
Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar: The Pandemic Years in New Orleans
By James Nolan
Fifth-generation New Orleans native James Nolan returns to the chaotic early years of the coronavirus pandemic in this unflinching first-person account, evoking the great writers before him who have grappled with the many contradictions inherent in epidemics. In the vein of Boccaccio, Poe, Defoe, Pepys, Camus, Mann, Burroughs, and Kushner, Nolan delves into the political and social upheavals found in countless other plague narratives to pen his own “rough draft of history,” centering New Orleans all the while. Nolan also touches on the way the past compulsively repeats itself, revisiting how he survived polio as a child, and later AIDS in San Francisco. He does not shy away from the bizarre, upside-down nature of pandemic life, including his experience of being evicted from the gothic Luling Mansion to make way for the filming of a vampire movie.
Nolan, an award-winning writer, poet, and translator, harnesses the haunting memories of the COVID era that continue to disrupt the lives of so many, confronting the abrupt changes that altered our reality forever. In Between Dying and Not Dying, he adds another pandemic story to the slush pile of history, offering the chance for connection amid our fractured world still in free fall since 2020.
Learn more about the authors and books being featured at this year's Louisiana Book Festival at louisianabookfestival.org.
