There’s an update on the New Orleans-based Neighborhood Story Project Elizabeth mentioned earlier this week. Well, okay, it isn’t really much of an update–the Project and its Brooklyn ally, Soft Skull Press, are still looking for funds–but it’s on MSNBC now.
And, actually, this new article makes the very interesting point that New Orleans, one of the most important cities in African-American culture, is somewhat lacking in black literary icons: “There are no author equivalents to Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino or the city’s many other musical greats.” That’s not strictly true–Alice Dunbar-Nelson was the first African-American to publish a short story collection, 1899’s The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, and Armand Lanusse edited the first anthology of African-American poetry in 1845–but I know what the reporter meant. If you have to turn to Google to find an African-American writer from New Orleans, he or she is probably not that well-known, unjust as that may be. Either that or I’m not as culturally literate as I thought, but let’s not go there.
(On the contemporary literary scene, Yusef Komunyakaa was born in nearby Bogalusa and spent a lot of time in the city in the 1980s.)